Almost 30 years after Twister swept into cinemas, Hollywood's allergy to anything resembling an original idea gives us a belated sequel that, as has proven the case with so many of these endeavours, plays more like a remake than a continuation. While recent revivals like Halloween, Top Gun and Beverly Hills Cop have been built around returning protagonists, Helen Hunt is curiously absent here, probably because only the horror genre allows actresses over a certain age to headline franchise instalments.
Twisters isn't a horror movie, but it probably should be. The 1996 original sparked a revival of the disaster movie (it's probably to blame for the Hollywood career of Roland Emmerich), a format whose heyday was the 1970s. Those '70s disaster movies were essentially a reworking of the monster movies of the '50s, replacing giant lizards with earthquakes and burning skyscrapers. The fun was in seeing famous faces fall to their death or be crushed by debris. Twister hired Michael Crichton as a screenwriter and had him try to shoehorn the Jurassic Park template into a movie about wind. The estranged couple rekindling their affection while battling an oversized threat was carried over, but the fun of seeing characters mauled, chewed and torn apart was all-too absent.
Twisters really wants to be a monster movie. You can tell it's unconvinced that a tornado is enough to impress today's cinemagoers (hell, we've had sharknados in the intervening decades!), and so it tries to make wind more frightening by setting it on fire and having tornadoes multiply like gremlins fed after midnight. Several towns are destroyed, but mostly offscreen. While the tornado is levelling main street, the camera remains with our heroes as they huddle under some makeshift cover. The trouble with this subject matter is that it's grounded in an ongoing real life tragic situation for a large swath of America, and so the movie has to walk on eggshells so as not to be seen to proft from tragedy. Twisters is careful not to make the destructive force of a tornado into a popcorn spectacle, resulting in a movie that is rarely entertaining.
For Twisters to work, it would need to be made by some insenstive European gorehound like Alexandre Aja or Xavier Gens, someone who couldn't care less if their film is seen as distasteful by the residents of Kansas. At one point we're teased the idea of seeing a bunch of little league baseball players swept into the heavens by an oncoming tornado, but of course it never happens. Why make a movie about a destructive force if you're not going to indulge in that destruction? Audiences love devastation so much that they were recently willing to sit through a three hour homework movie about a scientist just because they were promised a massive explosion at some point. Give the people what they want! Give us the modern equivalent of Jennifer Jones falling from a skyscraper and whacking the concrete all the way down. Give us OJ rescuing a cat. Give us a snivelling corporate villain for whom is reserved the most painful demise. Give us sexual chemistry between two leads covered in sweat and grease.
Twisters gives us none of that. No recognisable stars are killed, unless you count the prologue in which Daryl McCormack and Kiernan Shipka (not exactly household names) are swept away to lay down the obligatory trauma for our female lead, Daisy Edgar-Jones' storm-chaser turned desk jockey Kate. Glen Powell's cocky but warm-hearted YouTube storm-chaser Tyler rescues a dog, but it happens offscreen and it's from some rubble rather than a tornado itself. There is a corporate villain in the form of a property developer who swoops into levelled towns with offers to buy the land from locals who have lost their homes, but again it's a character who exists primarily offscreen and we never get to see them meet their maker in a satisfyingly grisly manner. The worst that happens to any of the nominal bad guys here is one of them gets covered in mud. Sexual chemistry is absent because Hollywood's complete misunderstanding of the MeToo movement has created an asexual cinematic landscape where even playful flirting is frowned upon. All we get here are a few moments where Tyler and Kate lock eyes for more than two seconds. It's enough to inspire "shipping" fantasies in the audience, but innocuous enough so as not to upset the new puritans, who would no doubt take offense to the nine year age gap between the leads.
Perhaps what's most curiously absent from a 2024 movie about the devastation caused by weather is any mention of climate change. The disaster movies of the '70s were always keen to highlight the folly of man and how our ambitions come back to bite us on the ass, whether it be builiding skyscrapers too tall, cruise ships too big or planes too fast. Twisters treats tornadoes as though they're the shark in Jaws, an unfortunate case of the human world gettng in the path of nature; there's never any suggestion that it might be a problem of our own making. Even Emmerich's overblown disaster movies were keen to point out that natural disasters were becoming increasingly unnatural in origin.
So what are we left with? Not a whole lot. Twister was no masterpiece but its sequel is so devoid of anything that might hold our attention that it plays as though a tornado has swept through the 1996 movie and laid waste to most of the elements that almost made it work. We don't even get any flying cows this time, because movies insist on taking themselves seriously now. The only beef here is between disappointed viewers and a Hollywood that forgot how to entertain us at some point in the last 30 years.
Directed by: Lee Isaac Chung
Starring: Daisy Edgar-Jones, Glen Powell, Anthony Ramos, David Corenswet, Brandon Perea, Sasha Lane, Daryl McCormack, Kiernan Shipka, Maura Tierney
