‘Twisters’ review: A temperate reimagining that might blow over

Glen Powell steers this tepid reinterpretation of the ’90s disaster flick, but does Twisters have enough thrills for today’s audiences?

Minari director Lee Isaac Chung has taken the same mantle as many prolific indie creators have done in franchise resurfacing. A spiritual successor to Twister seems like it wouldn’t be a tall order, but that mid-90s blockbuster does have its share of baggage. While Twister doesn’t have the fervent fan base that franchise films do, it was a specific kind of staple blockbuster. Jan De Bont’s original film hit the same time as Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day. The two launched a new trend of disaster films for a decade, with Twister arriving at a time when the science of tornadoes was just beginning to be understood by the masses. Cable viewers were glued to their TVs watching storm coverage, and the internet was once a place for curious minds to find niche interests.

When audiences turn out to see the soft-sequel-reboot that is Twisters, the standout change will be the way our understanding of that science has changed. So too has the audience. The world is now rife with armchair experts, especially in meteorology. This aspect especially is in a meta-textual conversation with the original film. Sure it may bill itself as a nostalgic summer rollercoaster, but Twisters may seem like a baffling reentry into the universe of storm chasers if you think about it just long enough.

Twisters makes an effort to flip a lot of things about the original film on its head, namely by taking the YouTube “Tornado Wrangler” celebrity Tyler (played by hot ticket item Glen Powell) and making him a complex foil to Cary Elwes’ outright villain from the 1996 original. Though starting as another series of chasing tornadoes and yeehawing in the process, Twisters spends its middle act convincing the audience that Tyler and the YouTube hillbilly crew that follow him aren’t all fun and games, instead having real experience and making an impact on affected communities. It’s actually the main character Kate, portrayed by Daisy Edgar-Jones (Normal People) who needs to have a change in her mentality after a traumatic event caused her to stop chasing tornadoes years ago.

A change in the weather.

An important thing to note when talking about a movie like Twisters is the state of visual effects. In the 90s, films like Jurassic Park, Twister and Independence Day were made on the precipice of the digital age. Before Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, nobody in Hollywood was making their entire films on a blue screen back lot. In 1996, practical effects and wind with a cows and tractors flying through the air were impressive for simply existing on the frame together. Now, people scrutinize film frames by looking for the seams and trying to determine what is and is not CGI. Weather effects and water have been mastered to the degree that they’re commonplace in every Marvel movie as a backdrop. Now with every entry in James Cameron’s Avatar franchise, that bar gets higher.

The thing that Twisters does have in its favor is the advents of capturing weather footage. While it was challenging to capture real storm footage in the ’90s, we’ve seen an evolution in weather technology and cameras. This is especially true in uncertain volatile zones like the infamous Tornado Ally through America’s Midwest. Twisters manages to find a happy middle ground between blistering effects sequences and rural skyline photography. That balance is thanks to stylistic direction by Chung and director of photography Dan Mindel (Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens).

There is some high pressure that comes with recreating the world of Twister for a new generation. While it doesn’t stand out like other Spielberg-produced projects, there are elements on clear display that make Twisters in good company. What sets the original apart is not just the sights and sounds, but how seriously it treats its subject material and the levity of the cast delivering it all. Twisters does its due diligence with the tense sequences. Every scenario holding for dear life under an overpass or the bottom of a pool is nail-biting.

What both films excel at is communicating severe weather survival skills to a general blockbuster audience. Although most of the science sounds like techno-babble, the delivery is sure to gain the attention of the weather-curious. Twisters knocks this out of the park, as it puts aside the schlock just enough to remind people that the devastation of tornadoes has a real life impact. If anything, the newer film does more to weave the disaster relief aspect into its plot.

Chasing character.

Kate’s character development signifies how Twisters in a lot of ways tries to recreate the magic of the original film. It goes so far as having her lose all but one of her friends in the opening scene’s devastating tornado, much like Helen Hunt’s childhood trauma impacted her character in the original film. Kate, however, is an interesting merger of Hunt’s Jo Harding and ex-husband played by the late great Bill Paxton in Twister. In the same way Bill did, Kate solemnly looks off at the clouds, interacting with the soil and local flora at a local rest stop as peers and rivals look onto her expertise as the “storm whisperer”. 

The dividing fulcrum between the two films is here, in the character work. Where Paxton and Hunt’s onscreen chemistry uses the characters’ established split by way of an ongoing divorce, Paxton comes back into the fold of his old life with Jo and the supporting cast. Twistsers‘ main duo between Powell and Edgar-Jones is an issue in itself, as Kate’s character is written to be so guarded that all advances from Tyler the Tornado Wrangler are met with tense dismissal. Eventually she opens up, but when she does it is all driven by plot to solve the final act problem instead. It is a relief to add Maura Tierney as Kate’s mother in the latter parts of the film to at least illustrate Kate’s pages a bit.

It didn’t hurt to have the original cast filled with eventual heavy hitters like Philip Seymour Hoffman and Alan Ruck back in the ’90s. While the new adventure’s supporting cast is stacked in its own right with the likes of Brandon Perea (Nope), Anthony Ramos (In the Heights) and our future Superman David Corenswet, they don’t bring the same cornball balance as the nerds of ’96 did.

It goes without saying, as is the case with most films he appears in, Glen Powell does almost all of the charismatic lifting throughout Twisters. Powell understood the assignment as a leading man, makes for a great supporting character, and is a fun representation on screen of the panache that is Midwest YouTube in cinema. Between this and his versatile performance in Hit Man, Powell is proving to be 2024’s MVP at the movies.

The bottom line.

Unfortunately, Powell alone isn’t enough to keep all the plates spinning, and while Twisters is super watchable (especially with a crowd and a massive sound system), there is an aspect of the ‘96 film that’s missing here: characters. Twister was a film that was a cable TV staple for a long time and while it was the bombast and spectacle that revolutionized disaster films which drove audiences to it initially, it retains a certain rewatchability that is unique to the era. Like Jurassic Park, the thing that keeps people coming back to the schlock again and again is the ensemble of entertaining characters to carry audiences through scenes that both do and do not have a stomchaser’s momentum. While Twisters maintains the original’s watchability as a spectacle for a new generation, it’s hard to see a future where audiences come back to chase it again and again.

Twisters is now playing in theaters everywhere. You can watch the trailer here.

Images courtesy of Universal Pictures/Warner Bros. Pictures. You can read more reviews by Evan Griffin here.