Minari director Lee Isaac Chung takes the reins for this sequel to 1996’s tornado-chasing hit. The result is a surprisingly adept disaster epic, says Katie Parker, one that wisely keeps things cheerful, wholesome and enjoyably dumb.
From Super Mario to Garfield to Jurassic Park, it feels like, by now, Hollywood must have milked dry every last sacred culture cow. Not quite—but they’ve at long last moved on to some less obvious choices. The latest of these is 1996 disaster thriller Twister—a film that, while very successful at the time, could hardly be said to have endured in the hearts and minds of the movie-going public, but which nevertheless is now the proud bearer of brand-new legacy sequel: Twisters.
Helmed by Minari director Lee Isaac Chung, and starring hot young things Daisy Edgar Jones and Glen Powell, Twisters may be a bit of a wild card as far as IP goes, but it’s one that the studio is backing for big results this blockbuster season. Against the odds, it outshines the original and suggests that Hollywood might be beginning to think outside the box even as it continues to plunder its own archives.
With barely a cursory gesture towards the original beyond a brief cameo from Bill Paxton’s tornado-measuring invention ‘Dorothy’, Twisters get underway with an all-new community of tornado chasers, centring on Kate (Edgar Jones)—a one-time weather-predicting prodigy who sadly abandoned her revolutionary research into the weather phenomenon after a bad experience in the field tragically wiped out nearly her entire friend group.
Having transplanted from rural Oklahoma to New York City, she is lured back into the wild and woolly world of tornado chasing when the other surviving member of her old cohort, Javi (Anthony Ramos) tracks her down years later. Kate’s enlisted in a nicely yada-yada’d project that apparently involves taking 3D photos of tornadoes in much the same way as those 360-degree photo booths they have at the Golden Globes.
Back in tornado country, she finds herself amongst a new generation of tornado chasers. These include tornado “wrangler” Tyler Owens (Powell), a social media star whose rowdy team of “hillbillies with a YouTube channel”, are competing with Kate and Javi for dominance during an unprecedented tornado season—one which threatens the simple lives of the good honest folk whose homes lie in its path.
Neatly sidestepping any of the more troubling existential implications that might accompany increasingly frequent extreme weather events, Twisters raises the stakes slightly with a higher body count than the original and a subplot involving predatory corporate greed, but never gets bogged down in too many details.
In fact, despite a lot of talk about weather science, Twisters wisely keeps things cheerful, wholesome and enjoyably dumb—and by the time things get going, it barely even seems to matter that Kate’s big invention seems to involve absorbing tornados with silica gel. Stuffed to the gills with simple, high-stakes action set pieces designed for maximum impact and minimal thought, Chung’s move into big-budget blockbuster territory demonstrates a slick self-assurance and clarity of vision that isn’t always apparent when smaller filmmakers are poached for big-scale projects.
Powell, meanwhile, cements his status as one of the most magnetic leading men in Hollywood today. Even with the slightly drippy Kate as his counterpart, his confidence and cocky charm are irresistible, permeating the film with the feeling that you’re in good hands.
However much money they may make, rarely do the spinoffs of beloved cultural properties leave their forebears unscathed. We’ve seen time and time again that even the most beloved legacies can come undone in the time it takes for Chris Pratt to open his mouth. Even the most self-aware, winking, meta attempts have started to stink of cloying cutesiness and outright cynicism, banking on a nostalgia that has barely had time to brew since the last botched reboot.
Twisters may be a legacy sequel, but it hasn’t got much in the way of a legacy to worry about, leaving Chung free to create something fresh, fun, and actually better than what came before it. Far from being a cinematic classic, the misty-eyed fondness with which 1996’s Twister is now remembered has more to do with what it represents: a time when you could make movies about a bunch of weirdos wooh-ing at the wind, with not a superhero in sight.
Twisters argues that this time has not been entirely lost—and neither have star power, Americana, or the joy of a big dumb movie about scary weather. For the most part, it makes the case well: with Chung and Powell’s self-assurance behind and in front of the camera respectively, even a shallow plot and bizarrely chaste romance cannot undermine what is a surprisingly adept and enjoyable disaster epic—one that proves sometimes it’s more fun to remember something you’ve actually had time to forget.
