Now on Peacock: 'Twisters' Needs To Throw Some More Caution To Its Wind

In the pantheon of fun dumb disaster movies (a genre I’ve oft admitted an abiding affection for) Jan de Bont’s smash 1996 hit Twister flies pretty friggin’ high. It’s got Bill Paxton sniffing the wind, it’s got cows, it’s got Phillip Seymour Hoffman looking for all the world like the Platonic Ideal of an Enby Hipster, who at one point speaks the words “the suck zone.” It is 113 minutes of deliciously brainless blockbuster entertainment, endlessly rewatchable—I will, pardon my pun, get sucked into Twister every damn time it crosses my path.

Even though that movie made half a billion dollars worldwide, it took Hollywood an inexplicable 28 years to dream up a follow-up (if you don’t count the Sharknado Cinematic Universe, that is). Borrowing a page from James Cameron’s playbook and slapping an “s” onto the title—say hello to Twisters! Smashing into theaters this weekend comes Minari director Lee Isaac Chung’s modestly entertaining follow-up, which … might be a sequel or might not be? They never really make that clear.

But yes, in the director’s seat is Lee Isaac Chung, he of the tender and emotionally complex and Oscar-winning itty bitty immigrant family drama Minari. And why not? Grab that dough, have yourself some fun. And this seems like it was a fun movie to make, if not necessarily to sit through at times. I imagine Chung’s presence helped to gather up some of the film’s impressive cast of up-and-comers, which includes Glen Powell, “the other one from Normal People” Daisy Edgar Jones, Anthony Ramos, Superman-to-be David Corenswet, Mad Men / Sabrina star Kiernan Shipka, Nope scene-stealer Brandon Perea, the ass-kicking Katy O’Brien of Love Lies Bleeding, American Honey star Sasha Lane, and that handsome handsome man Daryl McCormack who taught Emma Thompson how to fuck right in Good Luck to You, Leo Grande. Now that’s a cast worth slipping into the suck zone with!

Having just rewatched the 1996 film for the ten billionth time for research (I love my job), I can tell you with some assurance that the only explicit call-back to the original film here—besides the titular twisters, of course—is “Dorothy V,” the oversized soda-can that Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt’s characters spend the bulk of that film trying to get sucked up into a tornado so the little sensors it contained could magnify their scientific readings and give people in a storm’s path more of a warning. There are five Dorothys seen across the runtime of the original film, hence the Roman numeral V on Dorothy’s name—only the fifth one manages to pull off its job at film’s end and save the day.

That same container, “V” and all, shows up on-screen in the opening scene of Twisters, where a group of college research students are using it as they chase their own tornados. The twist being that their biggest brain on board, Kate Cooper (Jones), thinks she’s figured out a way to not only get Dorothy and her little sensors sucked up, but alongside her also are some great big tubs of a chemical concoction that will, you know, yadda yadda science the tornado itself to death. Please don’t make me explain this movie’s science; I am begging you. Basically, the chemicals go up and dissolve it from the inside until, whoosh, it’s all good and dead—undeniably and reliably ding dong dead, even.

Anyway, it’s disappointing that Kate wasn’t meant to be their child, since she’s basically a strange mixture herself of Paxton & Hunt’s characters—she’s got Paxton’s whole storm-sniffing sixth-sense thing (much like Amanda Seyfried in Mean Girls, their breasts can tell when it’s raining), with Hunt’s tragic twister-based backstory added on for good measure. Cyclones are their own personal white whales! Or their Jaws: The Revenges, if you will. Basically, this time, it’s personal, Mister Twister!

Needless to say, Kate’s big plans in the opening scene don’t end up killing off tornados forever—this would be a very short movie if they did. And so after the nasty wrath of nature has properly beaten down the dreamers, we smash-cut to a few years later and a very different landscape. Kate’s graduated and moved away to become a blandly business-suited cog in the corporate meteorological industry of New York City. (And yes, I do appreciate that my hometown, often demonized by voices pretending to represent Middle America, is in the world of Twisters, the safe choice for living. New York City is usually the last place anybody wants to be in a Disaster Movie!) But that’s all until one day when her old pal Javi (Ramos) shows up outta the blue, presenting Kate with an offer that’s too good to be true.

Actually, scratch that—what Javi offers her is an offer too ridiculous for a character in a disaster movie to refuse. Because disaster movie characters represent the people we pretend we’d be in these situations—no George Costanzas tossing little old ladies into the fire here. These people head straight into the storm and the danger when everything resembling sanity is screaming, “Hey, Kate, you have a great job in a big city and a trail of corpses behind you—maybe let it be?” Kate, disaster movie character and determined scientist, ain’t letting anything be though. And before you can shake a generic pop-country boot-scooting boogie at her, she’s right back in Oklahoma during what’s being pre-dubbed by the TV weather people as the biggest week for tornado activity that’ll ever be recorded.

Storm-chasing has changed in the few years that Kate’s been away, though—caravans of social media influencers and gawking tourists are the ones dominating the cornfields these days. And unfortunately Twisters is ultimately too decent-hearted a film to indulge in some deeply deserved satire here, so don’t go in expecting to see anything akin to the riotously nasty bloodbath in Alexandre Aja’s Piranha movie. Instead, the only influencer of note in Twisters is the good ol’ boy Tyler Owens, played by Glen Powell with full teeth a’blazing. At first glance, Tyler seems like the dictionary definition of douche-bro, but as Kate —and we, the audience— become privy to more and more of him strutting around in jeans, he becomes the film’s second hero. Because natch. Have you seen Glen Powell strut around in jeans? It is heroic.

That’s all set-up, all accomplished within the film’s first half an hour. From there, it becomes a series of tornado chases, just like the 1996 film, where each set-piece feeds something fresh to our disaster-craving addictions. But Chung notably does not structure the film the same way Jan de Bont did his, where each successive tornado notched us up the EF scale and culminated in the finale being that “finger of god” itself the EF5. And yes of course that was “unrealistic” in the 1996 film—that each storm they encountered just happened to be one level stronger than the one before it. So what? That was one of the film’s many silly pleasures! Twisters actually loses something in aiming for a more realistic arc. Simplicity becomes muddled. Efficiency all tangled up.

The narrative momentum in Twisters just sputters. I will give it credit that Chung’s film, with its side-plots about an evil real-estate developer and Kate’s estranged relationship with her mom (Maura Tierney, charming but wasted), is actively straining for more. For beauty and truth and all of those things that the residents of the Moulin Rouge were after. Chung and his DP Dan Mindel (who’s lensed both Star Wars and Star Trek films recently) really luxuriate in the beauty of the expansive center of this country—the amber waves of grain absolutely shimmer. You can feel the love of nature that Chung centered Minari around, here trying to elbow its way into this great big disaster movie, as a necessary equal and opposite to that very thing’s simultaneous destructive power.

But it’s ultimately odd and unwieldy, and that’s before you even get into the fact that the film refuses to say the words “Climate Change” at any point. Twisters is about ten minutes longer than the 1996 film, but it feels a full half an hour too long, repeating as it does realizations and character beats and stuttering around a formless structure for much of its middle section. It really does prove itself to be a textbook example of how rigorously, even dumbly, assembling a screenplay can do some movies wonders. What is “movie magic” for if not to give your movie a perfect five acts, one building right upon the other, delivering us to our big climax like clockwork gangbusters? That string of Dorothys, numbered aggressively one through five upon their sides, were story-telling genius, truth be told.

Still, Twisters is pretty fun, loaded up as it is with super likable and pretty folks. And the advancement in special effects in those twenty-eight years is certainly on display—when the big suckers start a’suckin’ the suckin’ don’t suck, as they say. But I don’t foresee myself popping this one in for a comfort re-watch as often as I still do the 1996 film. Its stabs at silliness are somewhat strained, usually a spin on something the earlier film did better. There’s a chicken gag here that isn’t even a pale shadow of the original “We got cows” master class. Remember that? We were once a proper country, and we had cows.