Legend has it that when James Cameron, fresh off of the success of The Terminator, made his pitch to 20th Century Fox executives that his next film should be a sequel to Ridley Scott’s Alien, he simply wrote the name of the film on a whiteboard and added an “s.” Then he put a line through the “s,” so that it read Alien$. The execs immediately greenlit Aliens, which went on to earn the 2024 equivalent of half a billion dollars at the box office.
One wonders if that story was on the mind of Joseph Kosinski when he went to Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment to pitch his idea for a sequel to the 1996 disaster film Twister. Simply adding the “s” did get the film greelit, but Kosinski himself didn’t get the directing gig. That went to Lee Isaac Chung, whose last film, Minari, was an Oscar-nominated story about Korean immigrants trying to make it as farmers in Arkansas. (Don’t feel bad for Kosinski. He directed Top Gun: Maverick instead.)
Unfortunately, I’m here to tell you that Twisters is no Aliens. Cameron expanded the original idea of “haunted house movie in space” into a knock-down, drag-out sci-fi action picture. Twisters just does the same thing as Twister, only with more tornadoes.
But more tornadoes are better, right? Not if you’re from Oklahoma, like Kate Carter (Daisy Edgar-Jones), the wunderkind meteorologist turned storm-chaser. She’s seen twisters devastate Tornado Alley too many times. Now, with her friend Javi Rivera (Anthony Ramos) and a group of like-minded grad schoolers in tow, she’s trying out a radical, new theory. Kate doesn’t just want to chase tornadoes; she wants to destroy tornadoes. Her plan is to launch barrels full of sodium polyacrylate — the moisture absorbing chemical used in diapers — directly into a tornado. The chemical onslaught will absorb the swirling water vapor which fuels the tornado, causing the funnel cloud to fall apart, and allowing the storm-chasers to live happily ever after. Unfortunately for both her dissertation and the continued health of her fellow storm-chasers, the tornado she chooses for a test turns out to be an F5 monster, but she only brought enough diaper goo to tame an F1.
Five years later, Kate’s got a steady job as an NOAA weather forecaster, based in New York City. Javi shows up at her office with a proposition. He’s working for Storm Par, a company that’s using military-grade antimissile radar to scan active tornadoes, which they hope will greatly improve forecasts for their private clients. After initially refusing the call to adventure like any good Hero’s Journey protagonist, she agrees to get back in the storm-chasing game. Back in Oklahoma for the kind of “once in a generation” tornado outbreak which happens every year nowadays, she meets Tyler Owens (Glen Powell, Hangman from Top Gun: Maverick), a storm-chaser with a thriving YouTube channel, a tricked-out truck, and a gang of plucky misfits. Since Kate is on the Heroine’s Journey, she’s got two guys to choose from. Will it be her nerdy old friend Javi or the hunky “cowboy meteorologist”? And how many more will have to die before both teams realize Kate’s anti-tornado tech was on the right track?
The answers to Twisters pressing questions are: 1. It doesn’t matter, and 2. Lots of people who also don’t matter. Sure, Powell’s jawline is so strong Tom Cruise could land an F-18 on it, but when it comes to romantic tension, Twisters is totally flaccid. Even though the tornado outbreak flattens farms houses, rodeos, and, in a nod to The Blob, a sold-out movie theater, this disaster movie is bloodless. Chung is a good director of actors, and Edgar-Jones, Powell, and Ramos give it their best shot, but they can’t seem to elevate the action into something I cared about, even when the bad guys are revealed to be disaster capitalist chuds of the We Buy Houses variety. Part of the problem is that Twisters is so repetitive. The opening scene with Kate and company fleeing from an F5 crackles, but it soon becomes evident that the intro emptied Chung’s trick bag. Twisters isn’t a bad film, per se; the Marvel era has produced much worse pablum than this. But it does commit the summer blockbuster’s worst possible sin: It’s just plain dull.
Twisters
Now playing
Multiple locations
