(courtesy IMP Awards)
How do you have a sequel when you don’t have a sequel?
When you have a film that sits well and truly within the universe of a previous film, with clear allusions to it, visually, narratively and character-wise, but which tries as much as it can be be its own creation.
Twisters is, whatever the producers may choose to call it, a sequel to Twister, and while the director of the 1996 classic, Jan de Bont, doesn’t consider this year’s stormy blockbuster hit to be a sequel – “It should be the same continuing story and saga of the same group of people …” – in so many ways that count, it is very much an updated carbon copy of its predecessor.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing; technology has moved on, as have moviegoers’ sensibilities, and so doing an update on a ’90s disaster movie blockbuster movie actually makes a lot of sense.
The thing is that Twisters, which is for the most part a really well executed film with a metric ton of emotional resonance and real thoughtfulness and empathetic humanity, falls somewhere between a remake and a sequel, touching on many of the same themes as the original.
We’re once again in the realm of storm chasers, those hardy, some may foolhardy souls, who, for money & fame or in a bid to secure crucial scientific data, pursue tornados across the midwestern United States, principally if Twister/Twisters is to be believe, Oklahoma, risking their lives to do so.
It is not a pursuit for the fainthearted and Twisters wastes absolutely no time making that point shockingly clear as the beating heart of the film, meteorologist Kate Carter (Daisy Edgar-Jones), comes across how science can very quickly turn to tragedy in an terrifyingly short period of time.
Fresh from a tragedy whose full impact and extent needs to be viewed fresh in the film, Kate retreats to a safe desk job in New York City until an old colleague of hers, Javier (Anthony Ramos) tracks her down and convinces her to go out in the field, for one week only, to test a new radar system which has the potential to transform how tornadoes are mapped.
Twisters being a blockbuster through and through, it’s abundantly clear form the get-go that Kate will go all in once again in no time flat and that a rival team to Javier’s corporate team – to begin with, the corporates are the “good guys” and the irreverent group are the “bad guys” but don’t let that all-too-obvious delineation of good and bad fool you – fronted by social media darling, Tyler Owens (Glen Powell), who drives into storms when others are racing away from them, will soon bring her into the fold.
Subtle Twisters is not, and whereas Twister was happy to take its time and let its characters draw together in fairly nuanced though definitive ways, the new storm chasing film on the block is more predisposed to bringing, for instance, Kate and Tyler together, in super quick time.
Again, not a bad thing and there’s a real tenderness and authenticity to the way that Tyler proves, even when he’s trying not to, to Kate that, while he livestreams his storm chasing and is as concerned with likes as he is data, he’s actually a good and decent guy and worthy of her attention and time.
While Twisters is most certainly not a romantic comedy, not even a little bit, there’s an undercurrent, just as there was in the 1996 film, of two people with common interests and goals coming together from adversarial positions, and it lends Twisters an emotional vibrancy that might otherwise have evaded it.
Far more than Twister, which didn’t shy away from spectacle and show, Twisters is into the big, epic destructive moments, giving us three major set pieces where towns are blown apart and people are sucked into the tornadoes in a viscerally intense that the original film simply didn’t feature.
It is, in many ways a far more pulpy and overblown (word quite deliberately used) creation that its predecessor, nowhere better evidenced than in the final act where the storm chasers become the rather melodramatic heroes of the show even as one of them, Kate, who has a Dorothy-like contraption that could stop tornadoes in their life-busting tracks, finds a way to redeem herself after the tragic events that empathetically open the movie.
The allusions to Twister too are everywhere from the wide, panning shots of trucks and Winnebagos, bristling with data gathering tech, set to thundering music (and yes, you can buy an album fill of Twisters original songs, thank you) through the obsessiveness of the lead female character, the rambunctious serious of Tyler’s madcap crew and the central mother figure, this time played by Maura Tierney, who plays Kate’s mom with a certain 21st century sardonic playfulness.
No doubt, the screenplay Joseph Kosinski chose these elements quite deliberately, and to be fair, they are used judiciously and well, giving those who have watched the watched the 1996 original a sense of continuity and connection, while invigorating Twisters with the same hell-for-leather fun and seriousness of its predecessor.
It’s a tipping of the hat that largely work and which doesn’t swallow Twisters whole which it is very clear, for all its slavish attentiveness to Twister, very much wants to stand on its own storm chasing storytelling legs (though, as you see many times, that’s a great way to get sucked into a tornado, and so blockbusters aside, is best avoided).
Twisters is, for the greater part, a lot of very affecting and thoughtful fun, dancing between heartrending spectacle, desperate reaches for meaningful redemption and a sense of chaotic, life-risking gleeful chaos, and while it does lose its melodramatic way a little in the final overdone act, it retains enough emotional intelligence and thoughtful introspection, to beguile and enthrall you, thanks to performances that pop, a cinematic sensibility that handles big and epic all at once, and a willingness to deftly fold in the old and the new (storm chaser tourists and groupies? Oh they’re a thing thanks to social media) that leaves you feeling, if not comprehensively satiated as Twister left you, then happy to have spent time with characters who matter in a world that seems to have all of the extremes of weather and humanity woven into it.