When Twister became a smash hit at the outset of summer 1996, it kicked off a season of glorious disasters. Twister tore up the Midwest; Independence Day blew up the east coast (and the rest of the world, but it was those images of DC and New York landmarks that really lingered); The Rock threatened San Francisco with a chemical attack (and some very reckless driving); and Fled, The Frighteners, Multiplicity, and Kazaam all left a smoking crater nationwide when they bombed on the same weekend. (A different form of disaster, granted, but still.) In 2024, Twisters is a big-budget disaster-movie sequel coming out in mid-July that somehow feels like a form of counterprogramming—to what else is playing at the multiplex, anyway. Depending on where and when you see it, the movie could also come across as scarily in sync with your surroundings. 18 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 known as Tornado Alley.
Is the real world too stormy to enjoy escapism in the form of Twisters? Obviously real tornados existed in 1996, too; they lent an otherwise pretty silly movie some gravity, the sense that then-new-ish CG tech was being used to supersize nature into spectacle worthy of a stunt show. In the decades since, we've gotten used to seeing similarly apocalyptic images come to life on the news or the actual world—whether through the man-made devastation of 9/11 or the different-man-made devastation of the environment, disguised as something more natural but no less frightening.
Twisters, directed by Minari’s Lee Isaac Chung, offers a fantasy of prevention, with a safe side dish of righteousness over the potential exploitation of families who lose everything in natural disasters. Kate Cooper (Daisy Edgar-Jones) has big dreams of neutralizing storms by allowing just the right substance to get sucked up into a tornado and sapping its moisture. 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).
It’s supposed to be a variation on the original movie’s lovably cornball dynamic, where scrappy scientists Helen Hunt, Bill Paxton, and pals were pitted against corporate, soulless competition; here, the earnest and idealistic scientist has corporate backing, while the scrappy folks appear more opportunistic. Yet despite some narrative switches and less ensemble hijinks, the movie’s attempts to separate the two teams are muddled, and often seem to be based on the characters’ own false assumptions; it takes forever for Tyler to catch up with the audience’s knowledge that “city girl” Kate is actually an Oklahoma native, and the movie doesn’t seem to understand or care that both teams use plenty of tech (or that the custom drills outfitted underneath his manly truck, designed to root it to the ground mid-storm, are also, in fact, pretty advanced technology). The movie doesn’t seem to have any particular feelings about Tyler’s sharable daredevilry or, especially, Kate’s desire to “disrupt” weather without ever speaking to the root causes of more frequent extreme weather events. Just so long as their hearts are in the right place, y’all.
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, even going so far as to stage its final scene in a familiar rom-com climax setting—no, not that kind of climax; even the metaphor of sex doesn’t enter the picture—without ever quite exceeding that Marvel-level friendly-colleagues heat. 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?
To some degree, Twisters represents a clean break from the original; by modern legacy standards, it’s far more remake than sequel. No human characters from the original movie return—the only cameo I spotted was Dorothy—and there’s no indication that any of that movie’s survivors have been vanquished by the storms that fill them with such awe and terror. (Of course, two of that ensemble’s strongest players are no longer with us, and while bringing out Bill Paxton or Philip Seymour Hoffman in a beard and an eyepatch to issue a one-scene warning about the dangers of the suck zone would not crack the top seventy percent of ways to fantasy-cast them in 2020s-era movies, they are both as missed here as they are everywhere else.) Mostly, it’s an update without updates, taking place now-ish enough—more washed-out cinematography and some online-video’s-eye-view cutaways—to pass for a 2024 version, even though it feels largely out of time, which is not always the same thing as timeless. The title is pluralized because, well, that’s a good, simple sequel titling scheme.
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.