| And the wind cries ‘Daisy’. —Alex Pappademas, culture editor |
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Twisters Has One Perfect Disaster-Romance Set Piece |
Depending on where and when you see it, Twisters might also come across as scarily in sync with your surroundings. Eighteen hours after I saw it, my phone buzzed with an emphatic tornado warning. My family made mordant jokes about viral marketing. Then four such storms touched down in the geographical region I was visiting—western New York state, not exactly Tornado Alley. As if anticipating that extreme-weather-based escapism might not feel quite as escapist in 2024 as it did when Jan De Bont’s original Twister opened in 1996, Twisters—directed by Minari’s Lee Isaac Chung—offers a fantasy of prevention. Kate Cooper (Daisy Edgar-Jones) dreams of neutralizing storms using moisture-sapping technology. This gives her fresh-faced team a logistical challenge not unlike the launch of Dorothy, the data-collection tool from Twister, only this time with bigger results, dammit. Unfortunately, Kate suffers a terrible loss in the opening sequence, and she takes her preternatural storm-watching prowess to a New York City weather-service desk job. Years later, her former colleague Javi (Anthony Ramos) lures her back into the field, which is how she meets showboating storm-chasing YouTuber Tyler Owens (Glen Powell).
Apparently not wanting to turn a rollercoaster ride into an explicitly environmental story about the furious wrath of a hellscaped Mother Earth, Twisters embraces its lineage as a romance, descended as it is from a movie about two scientist exes who scatter their divorce papers to the wind, metaphorically speaking. Actually, embraces is too strong a word here, despite the classic opposites-banter-and-attract dynamic between the two leads. Even as Powell’s Tyler guns it straight into the storm, Twisters approaches actual romantic connection cautiously. If this were a serious movie about the implications of climate science, sure, by all means, keep it profesh. But this is a movie about tornado disruption starring two extremely beautiful people who repeatedly eye each other from across various fields and highway lines. Is it too much to ask that its unconsummated attraction at least holds onto its potential energy, the way that the first film imitated (however secondarily) a comedy of remarriage?
There is one sequence that arguably tops anything in the original: Kate and Tyler attend a rodeo together, where their down-home heart-to-heart goes to hell as a darkening sky unleashes a ghostly tornado attack. That’s how Chung shoots it, like a looming monster, lightly knocking off Jordan Peele’s terrific Nope. The storm proceeds to rip the place apart, sending Kate and Tyler ducking and dodging through an Americana obstacle course of busted motel signs and falling cars. It’s the only time the movie creates anything remotely resembling the textured sense of place Chung brough to Minari, and the only time it truly feels like an implicit warning of something bigger and scarier than disaster-movie action circa 1996. Twisters isn’t exactly making light of our serious ongoing climate disasters, and didn’t need to make itself over into a full-on apocalypse. But maybe if Chung and his screenwriters put bolder, riskier feeling into the romance, the characters’ head-over-heels optimism (or, hell, a doomed romanticism) could guide the movie toward something more contemporary. Without that personal touch, the idea that a few individuals’ scientific know-how can save us from the weather feels too much like supersized spin. —Jesse Hassenger
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