Twisters

There is a scene in “Twisters” when our dueling squads of storm chasers suddenly find themselves tracking two tornadoes at once and are forced to choose which one to follow; left or right? It’s an apt metaphor for director Lee Isaac Chung’s standalone sequel to the 1996 blockbuster “Twister” given that we exist in a world where tornadoes are becoming more frequent and intense but also in a world where 1990s-styled blockbusters are becoming rarer. In a sense, Chung and his writer Mark L. Smith are positioned at their own fork in a road, trying to decide between making a mindless summertime disaster movie or a mindful one. There is a great set piece, or the idea of a great set piece, near the end when a tornado takes out a small-town water tower, flooding the street and transforming a landlocked disaster movie into a watery one. It’s the type of disaster movie ingenuity I generally like to reward. But it’s unclear whether we are meant to ooh and aah at that ingenuity, as if it’s an amusement park ride, or feel a real sense of climate dread, and because “Twisters” never decides, this moment, like the overall movie, winds up weirdly inert.

If the original began with our storm chasing protagonist losing her father to a dread F-5 tornado, “Twisters” begins with our storm chasing protagonist Kate Carter (Daisy Edgar-Jones) losing her boyfriend and a couple colleagues to an F-5. We catch up with her several years later, riddled with guilt and having left Oklahoma for a job at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in (Pace Picante Voice) New York City. She might be nails at work, but she’s not cut out for the big city, as we learn when a cab nearly hits her as she crosses the street, such dumbed down rural v urban humor that for a moment “Twisters” does seem to skew toward goofy mindlessness. But things get real when she is approached by her one colleague that survived, Javi (Anthony Ramos), recruiting her into his corporate sponsored band of storm chasers back in the Sooner State which puts her at odds of YouTube star and self-proclaimed tornado wrangler Tyler Owens (Glen Powell), a hot dog belying the heart of a true meteorologist. 

Part of the movie’s tension is meant to be in the screwball push and pull between these two opposing characters as they clash and then discover what they have in common. Powell is game, at least, a tornado wrangler as Wrangler® model; when he is seen drinking a can of Budweiser, he somehow manages to come across not as an actor subliminally pitching a product but a fun-loving character who just likes a cold one. I think that qualifies as Movie Star. Jones, on the other hand, is oddly muted, dousing any romantic energy. This is not entirely her fault. The character of Kate is conceived as having suffered real trauma, and so that’s what Jones appears to be playing, closed off, except that the screenplay never elucidates what she is feeling, or thinking, giving an interior performance with no interior. When she first stares down a twister rising high in the sky back home in Oklahoma, she freezes up, and this seems to be the key that will unlock her grief. But it never does. Once she fails to face this twister, she’s ready to face the next one, a dramatic hurdle more than an emotional one, as “Twisters” skates right over her psychological makeup as much as it fails to reconcile Tyler’s shooting off fireworks from inside a tornado with dispensing aid in the aftermath of that tornado. The movie has no idea what to make of these contrary philosophies and, despite eventually swathing itself in so much solemnity, doesn’t really seem to care.

The emotional hollowness of the characters ultimately trickles down to the rest of “Twisters” too.  Chung sees tornadoes not as wonders of nature, to borrow a phrase from the first movie, but existential threats, dropping out of the sky to destroy communities. “Twisters” does little, though, to advance any sense of community outside its storm chasing groups. Those little kids playing softball might as well be props. The subplot of Javi’s storm chasing team being in cahoots with a shady real estate developer feels like the opportunity to explore that idea, but the tycoon never really becomes a character, neither a cartoon villain, nor something starker and more sinister, raised, then forgotten. And as for the twisters, well, despite all the advances in technology, the digital kind still cannot induce the awe and terror of that muslin sock in “The Wizard of Oz.” 

The original “Twister” turned on finding a way to increase warning times for tornadoes, but “Twisters” turns on seeking a way to snuff out tornadoes altogether. The manner in which this is accomplished, and the science behind it, isn’t my field of expertise, but comes across as suspect as how Tyler grounds his pickup truck to not fly away when inside the cyclone. But it also suggests an inherent sense of absurd fun, the kind we get when Tyler and his crew first roll into the picture, a thread that Chung never fully pulls, apparently afraid it will counteract the graver material, which never rises above one dimension anyway. The sequence that works best, oddly enough, is the last one, so I will tread carefully, except to say that it’s set at an airport and mixes a rom com trope with a corny narrative callback and a shot of the Oklahoma sky echoing the characters. It’s one of the few times all movie that “Twisters” feels clued into a precise sense of mood and I found myself wishing it could take that as a cue to rip itself up and start again.