Rumour has it that Helen Hunt always wanted to make a Twister sequel, but could never get it off the ground (ba-dum tss). Hunt was the star of the wildly successful 1996 blockbuster, about Oklahoma’s storm chasers (with a laughably unimportant meteorological data collection premise), and yet she is absent from this long-awaited follow-up. In fact, it contains no legacy characters whatsoever, although it does have a brief nod to “Dorothy”, the original’s charmingly makeshift weather machine. It’s a bit of a mystery, then, as to why this particular sequel was greenlit.
Twisters (note the extra “s”) is a strange cross between 90s nostalgia and convoluted modern plot points that try to cover everything from the climate crisis to PTSD to corporate land grabs. Where the original had big tornadoes and unchallenging characters, its successor reaches for the kind of complex back stories that might better belong in its director Lee Isaac Chung’s award-winning Minari.
Daisy Edgar-Jones (Normal People) is Kate, a tornado-obsessed Oklahoma native who wants a big grant to fund her PhD on clouds. But after a horrific accident, Kate retreats to New York, where the depth of her trauma is showcased via newly highlighted hair. She is, eventually, lured back to the Sooner State to help her friend Javi (Anthony Ramos) collect storm data that could help better predict turbulent weather, and ultimately alleviate damage to local towns. Along the way, they meet “tornado wrangler” Tyler (Glen Powell), a cocky weather nut with a YouTube channel and tornado-withstanding truck, who turns out to be quite a nice guy actually, also keen on helping locals.
Helping people is a big thing in Twisters, bigger than the whirlwind romance between Tyler and Kate, bigger even than the special effects, which are admittedly spectacular, from the “twin” twisters and swirling cloud close-ups, to an amazing shot gazing up into the spiral of the tornado. In Twister, storm chasers ducked flying cows. Here, they avoid multiple, expensive-looking fireballs.
People are forever pulling onto unpromising dirt tracks and risking their lives to go and hand sad villagers a single belonging or direct them somewhere safe (incredible, the ignorance of every non-main character here, when it comes to tornadoes). This feels very different from the original, which dispatched swiftly any true notion of magnanimity and indeed anything other than the simple thrill of chasing tornadoes.
Here, attitudes get too confusing. One minute Tyler and Kate are howling with pleasure at “nature’s masterpiece”; the next they are soberly reflecting on the devastation their object of affection has wrought and concocting ways to destroy tornadoes for ever.
The secret to 90s films like Twister was that the stakes always felt strangely, comfortingly low. Here the stakes are aggressively high. There’s so much grief, so many serious conversations, so many attempts to make an otherwise entertaining movie mean something. Edgar-Jones and Powell have terrific chemistry but the film lacks the simple charm of its predecessor.
Twisters is a big, loud summer blockbuster, but it won’t blow you away.
In cinemas from 17 July