July 18, 2024
by Carla Hay
Directed by Lee Isaac Chung
Culture Representation: Taking place in Oklahoma and briefly in New York City, the action film “Twisters” ( a continuation of the franchise that started with 1996’s “Twister”) features a racially diverse cast of characters (white, Latin, African American and Asian) representing the working-class, middle-class and wealthy.
Culture Clash: A meteorologist, who feels guilty over the death of her three close friends in a tornado five years before, is persuaded to temporarily join a group of scientific tornado chasers, who are competing against a non-scientific group of YouTube tornado chasers.
Culture Audience: “Twisters” will appeal primarily to people are fans of the 1996 “Twister” movie and similar movies about weather disasters.
“Twisters” is not as suspenseful as 1996’s “Twister,” but “Twisters” still has plenty of action thrills in this franchise story about tornado chasers. The characters’ relationships are predictable but elevated by believable chemistry and good acting. As expected, “Twisters” has better visual effects than “Twister,” but the pacing of “Twisters” somewhat drags in the middle of the movie. Overall, it’s a crowd-pleasing film that does what is advertised.
Directed by Lee Isaac Chung and written by Mark L. Smith, “Twisters” has an entirely new set of cast members from “Twister,” but there are similarities between the two movies. Both movies have the tornadoes taking place in Oklahoma. Both movies feature storylines of “corporate-sponsored” tornado chasers versus “scrappy independent” tornado chasers.
Both movies have bickering between the leading male character and the leading female character because they’re in a power struggle, and they both want to deny an attraction that exists between them. The woman in this would-be couple is the more intellectual scientist, while the man is the less-educated by equally passionate tornado chaser. One of them has tremendous guilt over the tornado death of at least one person close to them. In both movies, the storm-chasing team that aims to find a way to diffuse tornadoes does so by using equipment with names inspired by characters in “The Wizard of Oz.”
“Twister” (directed by Jan de Bont and written by Michael Crichton and Anne-Marie Martin) had Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton starring as divorcing couple Dr. Jo Harding and meteorologist Bill Harding, who unexpectedly get thrown back together into tornado chasing, after Bill says he has retired from tornado chasing. They try to put a stop to high-level tornadoes.
Jo is motivated to be a tornado chaser because she witnessed her farmer father die in a tornado when she was about 5 or 6 years old. Bill visits Jo in Oklahoma because he wants her to sign their divorce papers. Bill has brought his fiancée Dr. Melissa Reeves (played by Jami Gertz), a psychotherapist, along for this trip. Jo and her tornado-chasing team use equipment that they call Dorothy.
“Twisters” updates the franchise by having a racially diverse cast, compared to the all-white cast of “Twister.” Another 21st century update to “Twisters” is YouTube is a big part of the plot because one of the rival tornado-chasing groups has a YouTube channel where the group does many livestreams. “Twisters” also makes more of an effort to show the tornado chasers helping strangers who are tornado victims after a tornado has turned a community into a disaster area. In “Twister,” the tornado chasers were definitely more self-absorbed and more willfully oblivious to helping communities recover from tornado disasters.
“Twisters” begins in an unnamed city in Oklahoma, the U.S. state where the movie was filmed on location. A group of tornado chasers, led by Ph.D. candidate Kate Carter (played by Daisy Edgar-Jones), is chasing a tornado as part of an experiment to see if the scientific powder and data sensory devices and they’ve created will diffuse and track the tornado. They use equipment that they call Dorothy, which is a nod to the first “Twister” movie. The plan is to open barrels of the powders and data sensory devices in the eye of a tornado.
Kate calls this experiment the Tornado Tamer Project, which is part of her Ph.D. thesis about disrupting tornado dynamics. If Kate’s theory works, she hopes that she can get grant funding for the Tornado Tamer Project. The other young people in the group are Kate’s loving and supportive boyfriend Jeb (played by Daryl McCormack) and their close friends Javier “Javi” Rivera (played by Anthony Ramos), who is energetic and opinionated; Addy (played by Kiernan Shipka), who is perky and sweet-natured; and Praveen (played by Nik Dodani), who is thoughtful and nerdy.
It’s mentioned several times in “Twisters” that Kate has an uncanny ability to predict which are the most dangerous tornadoes to follow. It’s an instinct that her farmer mother Cathy Carter (played by Maura Tierney), who’s shown later in the movie, says Kate has had since Kate was a little girl. Kate is an only child who was raised by her single mother. Kate’s father is not seen or mentioned in the movie, although one of Kate’s friends calls Cathy “Mrs. Carter.” She welcomes Kate’s friends into her home and likes to cook meals for them.
In the beginning of “Twisters,” Kate and her Tornado Tamer crew are chasing a tornado where they plan to do their experiment. Unfortunately, Kate miscalculated about what level the tornado was: It turns out to be F5 (highest level of destruction) tornado. Kate, Jeb, Addy and Praveen are all in the same vehicle and are caught right in the middle of the tornado. They escape from the car, but Kate is the only one of the four to survive. Javi was in a safer area in a separate vehicle, so he also survived.
Five years later, Kate is now working as a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in New York City. Through conversations in the movie, it’s revealed that after the tornado tragedy, Kate dropped out of her Ph.D. program and gave up on tornado chasing. At this point in her life, Kate has also been avoiding her mother’s phone calls and has rarely visited Oklahoma since moving away.
One day, Kate gets an unexpected visitor at her office: Javi, who tells her that he also moved away from Oklahoma after the tragedy. Javi says that after he graduated from their university program, he went back to his hometown of Miami and enlisted in the military. He also tells Kate that while he was in the military, he worked with portable radars that detect missiles. Javi has access to the prototypes and says they can use these radars for tornadoes, to make three points in the shape of a 3-D type of triangle. Later, it’s revealed that these radars are called Tin Man, Scarecrow and Lion, and their power control center is called Wizard.
Kate turns down Javi’s offer to work with him. Javi is persistent though. Later, he calls Kate and tells her that he’s put together a great team of scientists called Storm Par to help him. Storm Par also has corporate sponsorship for funding. Kate is persuaded to help Storm Par because of Javi’s radar idea and because Oklahoma is having an outbreak of tornadoes. However, Kate tells Javi that she will only work with Storm Par for one week.
One of the flaws of 1996’s “Twister” is that it never explained why so many tornadoes were happening in such a short period of time. “Twisters” avoids that flaw by repeatedly showing flashes of TV news reports saying that Oklahoma is having a “once in a generation” outbreak of tornadoes. In “Twisters,” the tornadoes arrive with little to no warning. If there is any warning, it could be as short as two or three minutes.
Soon after arriving in Oklahoma, an emotionally guarded Kate and the Storm Par team encounter a scrappy group of tornado-chasing YouTubers from Arkansas. The leader of the group calls himself a “tornado wrangler.” The group is led by cocky and frequently smirking Tyler Owens (played by Glen Powell), who is the star of this YouTube channel, which has about 1 million subscribers. Tyler’s tornado-chasing motto is: “If you feel it, chase it.” Like many YouTube content creators, Tyler sells a lot of branded merchandise.
Tyler is the only person in his group with experience as a meteorologist. (He also mentions later that he used to be a rodeo rider, as if the movie wants to prove that Tyler has cowboy credentials too.) The other people in Tyler’s group are camera operator Boone (played by Brandon Perea), a scruffy sidekick who does a lot of whooping and hollering; middle-aged Dexter (played by Tunde Adebimpe), who talks like a science nerd, even if he doesn’t have a college degree; Lily (played by Sasha Lane), a friendly hippie; and Dani (played by Katy O’Brian), an androgynous person who likes to hawk a lot of the group’s merchandise.
Tyler and his group loudly ride around and like to do daredevil things for their YouTube channel, such as set off fireworks in tornadoes. The Tornado Wranglers are being accompanied by a London-based reporter named Ben (played by Harry Hadden-Paton), who is doing an article about storm chasers. Ben, who is bespectacled and often nervous, is the token “buttoned-up” person who feels out of place and does the most screaming in fear as a passenger during these tornado-chasing runs. Dr. Melissa Reeves had that role in the 1996 “Twister” movie.
Besides Javi, the only Storm Par member whose personality is shown in “Twisters” is a frequently scowling or pouting colleague named Scott (played by David Corenswet), a scientist snob. Scott’s uncle Marshall Riggs (played by David Born) is the property developer mogul who is Storm Par’s chief investor. You can easily predict why Marshall would be interested in swooping in on victims of tornado disasters who lost their homes. Scott, who shows hints of sexism, is jealous/mistrustful of Kate.
Just like in “Twister,” the two rival groups of tornado chasers in “Twisters” compete to see who can get to the most dangerous tornadoes first. In “Twister,” the rival group to Jo’s independent group is a corporate-sponsored group led by sneering jerk named Dr. Jonas Miller (played by Cary Elwes), who is such an obvious villain, if he had a moustache, he would’ve twirled it. In “Twister,” Jo has the “underdog” group, which includes a wacky stoner named Dustin Davis (played by scene-stealing Philip Seymour Hoffman). In “Twisters,” Tyler’s group is the “underdog” group.
In “Twisters,” there is no love triangle, although there are hints that Javi is attracted to Kate, but he knows he has no chance of dating her because she sees him only as a platonic friend. The same can’t be said for Tyler. The back-and-forth sniping between Kate and Tyler is the type we’ve seen in many other movies where two people meet under competitive circumstances, they annoy each other with insults, but you know they’re really attracted to each other. After a while, Tyler makes his romantic intentions obvious, but Kate is the one who plays hard to get.
Because of advances in technology, the visual effects in “Twisters” are superior to what’s seen in “Twister.” Oddly though, “Twisters” does not show any signs that animals get killed in these tornadoes. In “Twister,” there’s a memorable scene where Jo and Bill see a cow caught up in the tornado. Maybe the “Twisters” filmmakers avoided showing animals getting swept up in tornadoes because they didn’t want animal rights activists to be offended.
As for the would-be romance, the circumstances are different in “Twister” and “Twisters.” “Twister” is about a couple with a marriage history together, and now a third person is involved. That’s in contrast to “Twisters,” which has a would-be couple who haven’t really begun dating each other. The relationships in “Twister” are more interesting to watch than the relationships in “Twisters.”
After the tornado tragedy happens in the beginning of “Twisters,” Kate is emotionally disconnected from almost everyone for most of the story, until she starts to warm up a little and show her vulnerabilities. Tyler is a stereotype of an overconfident heartthrob, but Powell brings undeniable charisma to this character. Edgar-Jones and Ramos also do quite well in their roles. “Twisters” could have told or showed more personal information about the other people in Tyler’s group. The movie never reveals what motivated these other members to become tornado chasers.
As it stands, “Twisters” capably handles what can be expected from movies about weather disasters, even if some of the scenes (just like in “Twister”) look unrealistic in how people are able to survive situations that would kill people in real life. The scientific aspects of the “Twisters” story are simplified so that the average non-scientist can understand. It’s obvious from the way that “Twisters” ends, many of these characters will be seen again in another movie in the franchise.
Universal Pictures will release “Twisters” in U.S. cinemas on July 19, 2024. A sneak preview of the movie was shown in U.S. cinemas on July 17, 2024.
