The 1996 sci-fi/disaster film TWISTER, produced under the aegis of Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment, provided us with a somewhat hyperkinetic but nevertheless still realistic vision of what it would be like to study the inside of a tornado, arguably the most destructive singular storm there is. It was an especially scary film for anyone living in the Midwest and the Great Plains of the United States, a large region commonly known as Tornado Alley. It also pitted one group of tornado chasers (portrayed by Helen Hunt and the late Bill Paxton) in it for the science, and another group of tornado chasers (led by Cary Elwes) who were in it seemingly more for the thrill of "being first". The end result was one of the biggest box office hits of 1996. Over the ensuing years, there was always talk about filming a sequel to TWISTER, but it remained talk, as original co-scenarist Michael Crichton and Paxton himself passed away in the interim. And then in the summer of 2024, we got TWISTERS, which seems like both a sequel to, and a more-or-less remake of, the 1996 original.
In TWISTERS, Daisy Edgar-Jones portrays a veteran storm chaser not unlike Hunt's character in the original, only this time, having survived one all-too-close encounter with an EF-5 twister in Oklahoma, has moved on to being a meteorological analyzer at the National Weather Service's New York City office. But then she is brought back to her former home state by one of the other survivors of that EF-5, portrayed by Anthony Ramos, who has a plan to map via radar the inside of a tornado and its inner workings. She agrees to go back into the heart of Tornado Alley with Ramos during what is shaping up to be an historic outbreak of massively destructive EF-5 cyclones. But she has to tangle with a team of renegade Marlboro men (and women), led by Glen Powell, who like to portray themselves as "tornado wranglers". Powell's crew come off as a bunch of ridiculous Central Casting rednecks to Edgar-Jones, until she finds out that Ramos has gotten a grant from an unscrupulous Oklahoma businessman ((David Born) who is basically a Vulture Capitalist profiting off of the misery of people whose homes and lives have been uprooted by this most violent weather phenomena. She nevertheless has perfected a theory of how it might be possible to suck the moisture content out of a twister before it can become super-destructive.
But in order to try that theory out with her equipment, she has to get into uncomfortably close range to a twister; and after Ramos agrees to drop his ties to Born, she, Ramos, and Powell team up to put her process into action. This comes down to a violent showdown with a three mile-wide twister about to level the town of El Reno in central Oklahoma.
In place of original TWISTER director Jan DeBont (who also directed the 1994 action classic SPEED) is Lee Isaac-Chung, who really didn't have anything anywhere near as big in his filmography as this (instead, he had smaller films like 2020's MINARI). It is not over-the-top to suggest that the visual effects, which are every bit as good for this film as the effects for the original were in 1996 (the scenes of the supercells and the twisters they spawn are exceptionally realistic), are far more credible than the often over-the-top redneck accents that have to be put on by Powell and his team; one must blame Smith and Kosinski for that. And we could have done without the truly awful clichéd country music "songs", even by veterans like Chris Stapleton and Miranda Lambert, and made do with the dramatic, minor-key underscore by Benjamin Wallfisch, which is every bit the equal of what Mark Mancina brought to the original.
Still, one has to give credit where it's due to what TWISTERS does well; and much of that credit goes to Edgar-Jones, who gives a lot of credibility and sanity to her character of a tornado chaser in this to "make a difference", as she often likes to say, and reduce the breakage in both property and lives that tornadoes cause every spring and summer in America's middle section. Obviously, this is not necessarily the most scientifically plausible film ever made; there is probably no way in hell that anyone is ever going to "stop" a tornado from forming, especially not in Tornado Alley itself. TWISTERS is obviously a thrill ride, and an often-frightening one, but its scientific credibility has some holes to it. But taken just on the basis of it being a thrill ride, one can do a hell of a lot worse.
Despite some reservations, I'm giving TWISTERS a '7' rating.
In TWISTERS, Daisy Edgar-Jones portrays a veteran storm chaser not unlike Hunt's character in the original, only this time, having survived one all-too-close encounter with an EF-5 twister in Oklahoma, has moved on to being a meteorological analyzer at the National Weather Service's New York City office. But then she is brought back to her former home state by one of the other survivors of that EF-5, portrayed by Anthony Ramos, who has a plan to map via radar the inside of a tornado and its inner workings. She agrees to go back into the heart of Tornado Alley with Ramos during what is shaping up to be an historic outbreak of massively destructive EF-5 cyclones. But she has to tangle with a team of renegade Marlboro men (and women), led by Glen Powell, who like to portray themselves as "tornado wranglers". Powell's crew come off as a bunch of ridiculous Central Casting rednecks to Edgar-Jones, until she finds out that Ramos has gotten a grant from an unscrupulous Oklahoma businessman ((David Born) who is basically a Vulture Capitalist profiting off of the misery of people whose homes and lives have been uprooted by this most violent weather phenomena. She nevertheless has perfected a theory of how it might be possible to suck the moisture content out of a twister before it can become super-destructive.
But in order to try that theory out with her equipment, she has to get into uncomfortably close range to a twister; and after Ramos agrees to drop his ties to Born, she, Ramos, and Powell team up to put her process into action. This comes down to a violent showdown with a three mile-wide twister about to level the town of El Reno in central Oklahoma.
In place of original TWISTER director Jan DeBont (who also directed the 1994 action classic SPEED) is Lee Isaac-Chung, who really didn't have anything anywhere near as big in his filmography as this (instead, he had smaller films like 2020's MINARI). It is not over-the-top to suggest that the visual effects, which are every bit as good for this film as the effects for the original were in 1996 (the scenes of the supercells and the twisters they spawn are exceptionally realistic), are far more credible than the often over-the-top redneck accents that have to be put on by Powell and his team; one must blame Smith and Kosinski for that. And we could have done without the truly awful clichéd country music "songs", even by veterans like Chris Stapleton and Miranda Lambert, and made do with the dramatic, minor-key underscore by Benjamin Wallfisch, which is every bit the equal of what Mark Mancina brought to the original.
Still, one has to give credit where it's due to what TWISTERS does well; and much of that credit goes to Edgar-Jones, who gives a lot of credibility and sanity to her character of a tornado chaser in this to "make a difference", as she often likes to say, and reduce the breakage in both property and lives that tornadoes cause every spring and summer in America's middle section. Obviously, this is not necessarily the most scientifically plausible film ever made; there is probably no way in hell that anyone is ever going to "stop" a tornado from forming, especially not in Tornado Alley itself. TWISTERS is obviously a thrill ride, and an often-frightening one, but its scientific credibility has some holes to it. But taken just on the basis of it being a thrill ride, one can do a hell of a lot worse.
Despite some reservations, I'm giving TWISTERS a '7' rating.
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