Twisters (Lee Isaac Chung, 2024)
‘You can’t take the Home out of Oklahoma’, so 28 years after the first Twister we are back in a movie theater watching its reboot Twisters, wearing a T-shirt saying ‘This is not my first Tornado.’
Okay, so I was not the one wearing that shirt, but in the movie Glenn Powell is. He is playing one of the lead characters, a popular YouTube meteorologist called Tyler Owens, who leads a band of mavericks, including Sasha Lane (from American Honey fame) and renowned character actor Tunde Adebimpe. At first Tyler comes across as a giant jerk, who is only after his own fame, shooting off fireworks from inside a tornado. But that’s before turning into a really swell guy (with a little bit of ego), who falls hard for fellow scientist Kate Cooper (Daisy Edgar-Jones), who can - with just a little bit of exaggeration - be described as ‘the tornado whisperer’ and who is also the true heroine of the movie, from whose perspective most of the story is told.
I started this review with mentioning Powell, cause I think that after Top Gun: Maverick, Anyone But You and Hitman this movie really confirms his arrival as a movie star. Why? Let’s just say the star wattage is enormous, like peak Tom Cruise.
All the same, it must be said that Daisy Edgar-Jones (Normal People, Where The Crawdads Sing) is doing most of the emotional heavy lifting here, as Kate is the one who suffers incredible trauma at the beginning of the movie, it’s so severe you can hardly believe she would ever return to the field to try and tame some tornado’s (which is basically the movie’s ultimate goal).
Kate is convinced to do so by fellow former student Javi (Anthony Ramos), who is leading a team backed by serious investors, who want to gather as much data about tornados as they can. Javi’s tech team and Tyler’s circus don’t really see eye to eye, so of course they find themselves chasing the same tornadoes with varying results and Kate getting more or less caught in the middle, as she discovers the various ways the two rivals are motivated.
Twisters is a perfect popcorn blockbuster, as long as you don’t think too much about the very real havoc tornadoes create in places like Oklahoma, whenever you see a couple of people picked up off the ground and thrown through the air.
Is it better than the original Twister? Oh yes, Jan de Bont’s movie was pretty good, but the action scenes here are much more intense and the personal stakes feel very real at all times.
Director Lee Isaac Chung, who previously directed the arthouse movie Minari, once again show off his love for the American Mid-West with a great sense of location. The script by Mark L. Smith (The Revenant, The Marsh King’s Daughter) based on a story by Joseph Kosinski (Top Gun: Maverick), certainly knows how to raise those stakes, while at times you can also feel the influence of executive producer Steven Spielberg (much as it did with the first Twister, which was also produced by Amblin Entertainment).
Twisters offers great escapism and feels like it will be a commercial winner too.
I give it four stars!
Note: Twisters is already in cinemas in some countries and is released in most of the world later this week.