Twisters
Lee Isaac Chung captures the chaos of natural disasters (in more ways than one).
In the Twister franchise, tornadoes are destruction personified: moving columns of whirling wind that rip across the Oklahoma plains with a will of their own. The 1995 Twister ascribes a certain malevolence to its tornadoes. When one destroys a drive-in movie screen showing Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, it does so just as Jack Nicholson chops through the hotel room door to announce, “Here’s Johnny!” In Twisters, the movie theater is an old movie palace, and the movie is James Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein, with the tornado making its entrance just as Colin Clive announces his experiment’s success by shrieking, “It’s alive!”
Twisters is more like a spiritual successor to Twister than a sequel. The two share a few common elements, such as their Oklahoma setting and some scientific equipment named for Dorothy Gale from The Wizard of Oz, but otherwise the two might as well be set in different universes. This new entry doesn’t break a sweat trying to force a new story into the same timeline as the original. Twister was a divorce rom-com disguised as a disaster movie. Twisters reserves most of its romanticism for weather patterns and Glen Powell’s biceps, skimming past any tension between his storm-chaser character Tyler and the film’s meteorologist protagonist Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones) so quickly that the subplot might as well not exist. Twisters has so much on its mind that it isn’t able to focus on any single idea for too long. The ideas all end up scattered in the wind whenever the film shows us what we really came to see: the destructive power of a tornado.
If Twisters has a unifying theme, it’s about the unpredictable, destructive power of a summer cyclone. The point of a disaster movie is to gawk, and Twisters provides plenty of opportunities to do so, both during and after the titular storms. Faraway clouds become vistas of sweeping grandeur, small and distant tornadoes are catalysts for wonder and excitement, and the pounding winds of EF5 tornadoes are sources of brief, intense fear. Lee Isaac Chung’s directing in these sequences is solid and focused; we never get lost in the confusion of the storm, even as the film cuts back and forth between roaring wind and the sweat on individual characters’ faces as they take shelter from it. The standout sequence is a scene in which Kate and Tyler, along with a few townspeople, must hide in an empty swimming pool as a twister bears down on their town. After rapidly edited shots of the panic of getting to shelter, Chung keeps the camera focused on Kate in one long, steady take, zooming in on her curled-up body by inches, with only Tyler’s silhouette shielding her from the fury of the wind and rain.
If only the rest of the movie were so tightly focused. The dialogue is messy, with storm-chasers explaining meteorological jargon to each other in casual conversation for the audience’s benefit. The film’s many themes are introduced in a similarly clumsy manner. Characters toss off lines about the tension between city and country, intellectual understanding and intuition, raw data and gut feelings, as though simply articulating the friction between two forces is enough to sustain conflict. These intersecting tensions never manage to cohere into anything substantial. Even tornadoes need more than just the confluence of cold air and low pressure to sustain their shape.
Twisters throws around its many ideas like so much storm-driven debris. Because they’re so rapid-fire and simple, they defy proper definition, remaining as hazy images on the movie’s radar that never resolve into a complete picture. It’s as though the script was run through a focus group to keep it as aggressively apolitical as possible. In a movie about a historic outbreak of tornadoes, the words “climate change” are never once uttered. Instead, the tornadoes are treated almost like an invasion of individual cloud formations that can be fought, even tamed. The titular twisters seem to have a will of their own and an intent to destroy, a deliberate simplification of a complex weather pattern that in reality is indifferent, unfeeling, and growing worse as a direct result of humankind’s actions.
When disaster strikes, the aftermath is abstract, distant, and brief: a few shots of splintered wood covering the landscape in the wake of the storm, short enough that they won’t dampen the excitement of the next twister looming on the horizon. To its credit, the film doesn’t linger on misery, but the stakes remain aggressively individual, tied to the success of Tyler and Kate as a self-described “tornado wrangler” and a “tornado tamer,” respectively. Like any other big-budget Hollywood movie, this film is designed to be a singular storm cutting a swath across the box office. Part of the moneymaking formula includes heroic individuals who, like cowboys, can’t stop themselves from charging in alone against impossible odds. The myth is beautiful, simplistic, and as American as a tornado whirling across the Oklahoma plains.
—Sarah Welch-Larson
★★☆☆
Twisters is in theaters now.