Twisters Needs to Be Either Smarter or Dumber

The original Twister may not be a great movie, but the years have made it look better and better for the same reasons a vintage Gap jacket feels like designer gear. Now that stores only sell clothes that have been slapped together from plastic sheeting and surgical staples in fast-fashion gulags, what used to be considered basic construction — stuff like finished seams and sturdy material — becomes downright luxurious in comparison. By the standards of 2020s content slop, so many of the elements that made Jan de Bont’s 1996 movie a meat-and-potatoes blockbuster now seem borderline artisanal, and I’m not just talking about the practical effects, which involved enormous wind machines and tractors being dropped from helicopters, and which have held up remarkably well.

It’s the more granular details that stand out, like the now-unfashionable clarity of the lighting, all the better to appreciate the faces of the glorious array of character actors — among them Alan Ruck, Jeremy Davies, Tár director Todd Field, and a 28-year-old Philip Seymour Hoffman — who play storm-chasing grad students. Hell, all the better to appreciate the faces of the leads, Bill Paxton with his huge honking forehead and Helen Hunt with her girl-next-door earthiness, two actors whose sexiness was only enhanced by having real-world texture. Twister was a divorce comedy tucked inside a disaster flick, an idiot His Girl Friday about two workaholics bickering their way back together over the course of a day spent trying to get a bucket of tennis-ball-size sensors sucked up into a tornado. It was incredibly silly down to Hunt delivering a line implying a twister had hunted down her family, but it was also grown-up in an easy way that feels like a novelty now, with characters who’d racked up some living.

Twister isn’t some sacred (flying) cow, is what I’m saying, and Twisters isn’t some travesty defiling a classic. The not-quite-three-decades-in-coming sequel instead underwhelms in a more poignant way by suggesting we really have forgotten how to work in the mode of the original. It’s an attempt to make a big, dumb entertainment that keeps getting in its own way, unable to stop itself from being serious about things that in no way need to be taken seriously. It’s not a throwback, but it doesn’t feel like an imaginative update on the original, either. If Twister is the thrifted mall find, Twisters is the sweatshirt made by the DTC brand that touts its use of century-old manufacturing processes on Instagram with a fit that is universally unflattering.

Actually, one person comes out of Twisters looking good, and that’s Glen Powell. Powell plays Tyler Owens, a self-styled “tornado wrangler” from Arkansas who’s accompanied by a grungy (but universally attractive) team that funds its extreme adventures with T-shirt sales and a sizable following on YouTube. Tyler, who has a degree in meteorology but presents himself as a renegade outsider, is the kind of role Powell specializes in — the self-aware cheeseball, the hunk who winks to let you know that he knows how ridiculous he is and how well what he’s doing is working anyway. Powell has a sculpted prettiness and million-watt smirk that would run the risk of reading phony in a more grounded film, but Twisters is the stuff he was made for, even if he’s more a supporting player than a lead. The people not suited to the film are star Daisy Edgar-Jones and director Lee Isaac Chung, who struggle to scale their work up to a scope and tone that befits a movie in which a tornado catches fire.

Edgar-Jones and Chung have the same issue: They understand how to operate only on an intimate level. Chung’s previous filmography consists of meditative indies like his semi-autobiographical 2020 family-farm drama, Minari, which the incongruously poetic opening shot of Twisters, with Edgar-Jones taking a photo of the sky from the middle of a grassy field, recalls. His instinct in Twisters, which was written by Mark L. Smith, is to foreground the emotional dramas of his characters, particularly his wounded protagonist, Kate Cooper (Edgar-Jones), at the expense of the far more lively ones involving the epic storm formations constantly whipping up on the horizon. Kate, who loses her boyfriend (Daryl McCormack) and two classmates (Kiernan Shipka and Nik Dodani) to a tornado-taming experiment gone wrong, is saddled with a trauma plot that is never anything but tedious, no matter how many times Edgar-Jones freezes up or goes to the bathroom to moisten the back of her neck.

It’s unclear why Edgar-Jones, who exudes the Britishness of a Liberty of London party frock, keeps getting cast in very regionally specific American roles. But the plausibility of her Oklahoma twang, whose intermittence may or may not be deliberate, isn’t as much of an issue as the movie’s pivoting on her character’s ability to rediscover her weather-reading mojo. Lured back to her home state from New York City by an entrepreneurial former colleague named Javi (an underutilized Anthony Ramos) — whose obvious crush puts him at the acute end of a malformed love triangle once Tyler comes on the scene — she gradually overcomes her survivor’s guilt in less of an emotional journey than a series of screenwriting bullet points to be endured. Whenever Tyler rides whooping through a scene with his specially kitted-out truck and his entourage (made up of Brandon Perea, Sasha Lane, Love Lies Bleeding star Katy O’Brian, and TV on the Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe), he looks like he’s in a much more enjoyable movie than the one we’re stuck with, which can never square its gleefully destructive spectacle with its guilty insistence on showcasing that spectacle’s human cost.

That compulsion to reverse engineer serious stakes for a fundamentally frivolous story is Twisters’ most contemporary quality and its most irritating. It isn’t the kind of picture that would fling an errant bovine across the screen, which is fine — the storms, which fold in some footage of real-life tornadoes, still look good, especially when the film allows itself the leeway to stage a set piece around an oil refinery and an old movie theater. But the movie also can’t bring itself to say the words climate change, even as the plot keeps skirting the idea of the weather getting worse. Twisters wags its finger at nothing in particular, repeatedly lingering over the wreckage of small towns in the wake of a storm but framing it only as a kind of martyred Americana. The original film was about ragtag academics versus corporate stooges, but in the sequel, everyone’s out for a buck. Predatory investors come swooping in to buy up storm-damaged properties, and the closest thing we get to altruism is the revelation that Tyler’s team puts its merch money into food giveaways, like baby Mr. Beasts.

Twisters is strangely insistent that the moral thing for its characters to do is rush toward communities about to be hit by a tornado, though it labors to show how exactly they’re supposed to help once they get there. There’s no sadder sign of the times than a film whose moment of triumph involves an individual figuring out how to diffuse a single storm — a supposed step toward saving the world — but which refuses to acknowledge the larger issues buffeting its characters like gale-force winds.