Twisters | 2024
(from left) Tyler (Glen Powell) and Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones) in Twisters, directed by Lee Isaac Chung. Photo by Melinda Sue Gordon.
It's almost surprising that it's taken almost 30 years to make a sequel to Twister, since that film was a runaway hit and the second-highest-grossing film of 1996 (behind Independence Day, which didn't get a sequel until 2016). Perhaps it was the failure of director Jan De Bont's Speed 2: Cruise Control or the fact that it was such a self-contained story, but whatever the reason, it's taken a surprising amount of decades for the studios to return to this particular well.
The film we're given shows that perhaps this lightning can't be bottled twice. To its credit, Twisters avoids some of the pitfalls of many legacy sequels by not leaning too hard into nostalgia - you'll see no mentions of Bill Paxton or Helen Hunt's characters here. Instead, it follows the path of a loose remake, but your mileage may vary depending on your nostalgia for the original.
I would like to think that my feelings on Twister aren't completely clouded by rose-colored glasses of seeing the original as a 10-year-old who quickly became obsessed with tornadoes as a result. Revisiting the film recently confirmed my memory that it's a mostly fun ride with a terrific supporting cast that's hampered by a weak screenplay. Twisters doesn't suffer from the same overly expository dialogue and lame one-liners, but its characters are much less compelling. The set-up is basically the same: a group of storm-chasers travel across Oklahoma during a major tornado outbreak hoping to gather data that allows them to neutralize the twisters before they cause any damage.
(from left) Tyler (Glen Powell) and Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones) in Twisters, directed by Lee Isaac Chung. © Universal Pictures, Warner Bros. Pictures and Amblin Entertainment.
Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones) is a former chaser turned meteorologist whose tragic past pushed her away from the field, only for a friend to drag her back in with the promise of fulfilling her dream of destroying tornadoes. But a rival team of YouTube daredevils are also hot on the trail, led by hotshot "tornado wrangler" Tyler (Glen Powell). This appears to mirror the antagonist aspect of the original Twister, but director Lee Isaac Chung (Minari) and writers Mark L. Smith (The Revenant) and Joseph Kosinski (Top Gun: Maverick) wisely switch things up here, making it clear pretty quickly that it's actually Kate who is on the wrong team, their corporate sponsors using their data to swoop in and snatch devastated properties from grieving homeowners on the cheap. Reluctantly teaming up with Tyler, Kate becomes more determined than ever to make her dream a reality, but the deadly weather outbreak may be more than any of them bargained for.
The biggest issue with Twisters isn't so much that it covers such familiar ground, its that it does so in such a generic way. Chung's filmography, which includes some truly incredible films like Minari and Munyurangabo, is a more character-oriented filmmaker than Jan De Bont, but the characters here just aren't that interesting. Powell is a born movie star, and he has charisma to spare here, but Edgar-Jones' character feels flat and underdeveloped, which not only hampers the central romance, it doesn't give the audience much to hang on to.
There was also a sense of awe in the face of nature present in the original Twister that feels strangely absent here. The tornadoes feel almost perfunctory, but the character drama isn't compelling enough to make up for it. Twister is by no means a great film, but it has a sense of playfulness and fun that Twisters mostly lacks as it attempts to mirror the original beat by beat. There are some good moments here and there, but it never quite achieves that same level of goofy fun that made the original so enduring.
