The only real through-line between 1996's summer blockbuster Twister and this week's "stand alone sequel" (whatever that is), cleverly titled Twisters, is that in a dramatic prologue that sets up our main character's redemption journey, we see that she and her team are working with "Dorothy," the bucket of flying sensors that storm trackers sent into the middle of a tornado in Jan de Bont's original adaptation of Michael Crichton's novel.
Beyond that, the only real connection between the two films is the IP and an end credit attributing the film's characters to those based on ones created by Crichton. Rather than finagle some legacy story around the daughter of Helen Hunt's Jo (from the original film) on a quest to pick up where her mom left off or something, the characters in Twisters are the 21st century version of storm-chasing archetypes with predictable flaws and unsurprising fates.
And if you choose your disaster movies based more on the scale of destruction and trauma inflicted by any given film's monsters rather than the depth of plot or complexity of characters, then you are in for a treat in Lee Isaac Chung's big-budget creature-feature. And that's truly what you'll find in Twisters, a film ostensibly about a "retired" storm chaser (she's barely in her 30s), Daisy Edgar-Jones's Kate and her chance to make up for a storm chasing escapade gone horribly wrong in her college days. Instead, the most compelling aspect of the film is the monsters created in a computer, towering and "unpredictable" tornadoes that, over and over again, are proclaimed "the worst in a generation."
Following the events of the prologue (hinted at in the trailer below), the film fast-forwards to Kate's new life in New York City, where she's a meteorologist at the National Weather Service using her "gift" for storm prediction from a safe distance and behind a computer screen. But her old storm-chasing teammate Javi (Anthony Ramos, who I'm genuinely tickled to see continue to build his filmography) shows up at the office one day to tempt her with a week back in action in Oklahoma, where a rash of storms are wreaking havoc on small communities across the state.
Back in the wild, she (and we) are introduced to Javi's new state-of-the-art tracking technology (that still somehow requires actual humans drive into the depths of these beasts...don't we have robots for that now?) as well as a rogue team of chasers led by Tyler (Glen Powell, ever the budding major movie star) who are apparently more concerned with video views than storm safety and science.
The film's entire narrative arc is so predictable it's nearly insulting (and this coming from someone who actively tries not to decipher a plot in the middle of a film, preferring to allow it to unfold however the filmmaker intends); a more generous read would perhaps be "brainless," in that as summer blockbuster fare goes, this one is pure style over substance. We soon learn who's funding Javi's new technology and why; we discover there's more to Tyler's schtick than meets the eye, and we get enough background on Kate (courtesy of a lovely cameo role by Maura Tierney as her mother) to glimpse where her hero complex comes from.
Most of the film's several action sequences are thrilling if silly, as the storms always seem to have a way to do just what we need them to do so the film can move on to its next plot point. There's a particularly egregious moment in the film's final act with Javi and a coworker stuck in the belly of the beast as a factory explodes near them and their SUV is toppled onto its side in the chaos. The sequence of events that gets the car righted again and puts the two on their way is memorable, sure, but only because it's so laughable.
And this is how much of the film progresses, a series of eye-rolls and reluctant giggles if you ever stop long enough to think about what's actually going on. And yet, the combination of Chung's keen eye for filming nature and framing a scene (he's made a major budget leap here; the filmmaker is best known for his much quieter, more intimate drama, Minari) and the charismatic trio of Powell, Edgar-Jones and Ramos nudge the movie to just this side of passable, a sort of nostalgic throwback to the summer releases of the mid-'90s where its predecessor made such a splash.
Twisters is now in theaters.
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