'Twister$' is the Platonic Ideal of a Summer Blockbuster

TWINS!!! WE GOT TWINS!!!!!

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Hi. I was on vacation. It was nice. I’m back now. So hopefully back to more or less regularly scheduled posting, with maybe a little more than you bargained for as I attempt to catch up.

Now then, Twisters, which opened huge ($80 million, when they were expecting $50 million).

Universal

Twisters feels like the platonic ideal of the American blockbuster, in that it’s exciting, escapist, and basically sexless, where production values and vibes matter much more than plot or acting. It’s almost impressive that someone could make a movie about killer weather and “once-in-a-generation” tornado clusters, set in state with a fracking-induced earthquake epidemic no less, without ever once mentioning “climate change.” And yet I can’t help but grant that it was probably a good decision.

This is at its heart a big, stupid movie about hot people chasing and running from killer wind. Reminding people of actual existential threats to civilization would harsh the mellow, kill the vibe, and almost certainly cut against the stupid escapism of it all, which is of course the entire reason it exists. Big tornado fuck shit up, two popcorn buckets way up.

Human activity is generally the root cause of the worst weather and geologic phenomena these days (per the article linked above, “humans have now caused four of the five largest earthquakes in Oklahoma’s recorded history”), and Twisters, a sequel/reboot/remake/whatever-you-want-to-call it of 1996’s Twister (with a similar story and all new characters), is a movie that asks: what if human ingenuity was the cure for killer weather instead of the cause? That’s exactly the level of thought I want to ponder from the comfort of a well-air conditioned theater when it’s 115 outside.

Daisy Edgar-Jones, an actress whose bangs are absolutely always in her eyes in every role (though I quite liked her in an underseen horror movie called Fresh) plays Kate, a graduate student in meteorology at the University of Oklahoma who has a big plan to disrupt the entire tornado supply chain. When we catch up to her in the first scene, she’s chasing storms and trying to win a big grant with a crew of other grad students, including her boyfriend, Jeb (lol) played by Daryl McCormack. The two of them are the picture of romantic contentment, thrilled by their mutual interest and sharing a loving embrace before hopping in the car to chase an oncoming storm.

It’s the kind of Hallmark perfect scene that, in a movie like this, all but confirms that Jeb is absolutely going to die in the next scene. A too-perfect a boyfriend in the first act is like a mom with a bandanna on her head; you know they’re not long for this movie world. Twisters is a tornado movie that operates on shark movie logic, where you sort of understand going in that characters are going to die, and a big part of the fun is predicting which ones it will be. Oh no, the wind!

Anyway, Kate’s big idea is to break up tornadoes by filling them full of super-absorbent polymers (“the same stuff used in baby diapers!” one of the team yells into the camera), since moisture is apparently a big factor in supercharging tornadoes. “What if we could sop up tornadoes with giant baby diapers?” is honestly just great blockbuster writing by Twisters screenwriter Mark L. Smith. I wish they somehow could’ve incorporated a giant pitcher full of blue liquid. (Side note: did you remember that Michael Crichton wrote the original Twisters, with his wife? I did not).

Tragically, a killer tornado (an EF5!) sucks Kate’s boyfriend into the sky before she can placate it with diaper particles. She naturally gets disillusioned with diaper disruption and leaves storm chasing behind to take a desk job at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in New York City. And there she’s been, for five uneventful years, following a movie magic time jump.

Thus, it’s up to the only other surviving member of the original diaper team, Javi, played by Anthony Ramos, to lure Kate out of her urban exile on the eve of a massive storm season. Javi, as he explains to Kate over coffee, has returned from the military to take a corporate job with “Storm Par,” a company that aims to utilize former military tech to create unprecedentedly detailed 3D models of tornadoes. Much more boring than diaper particles, sure, but think of the children!

So Kate takes the assignment, on a one-week trial basis, and before you know it she’s back in Oklahoma chasing whirlwinds. If that sounds a little dull in theory, in the world of Twisters it’s more like Burning Man with real-time doppler data. Probably the best thing that Twisters does is to posit an entire community of people who follow wind storms around the heartland like Deadheads for extreme weather. I have no idea whether this community actually exists in some form or not, but like the clown union hall in Joker or the extreme polyathletes chasing the Ozaki Eight in the Point Break remake, the important thing is that I want to believe.

It’s within this charged milieu that newly buttoned-up Kate meets the handsome cowboy who teaches her how to loosen up — Tyler, played by Glen Powell, a famous storm-chasing YouTuber. Tyler, who calls himself a “tornado wrangler” and has his face on T-shirts, intuitively recognizes Kate’s preturnatural storm-predicting qualities (a real weather prodigy, this one) and takes a shine to her. Meanwhile, she thinks he’s a joke. “If you feel it, chase it!” goes Tyler’s mostly unconvincing slogan.

Tyler shoots fireworks into a tornado at one point, which is another fun idea that someone had. Kate slowly discovers that Storm Par is a front for greedy developers, which pushes her away from Javi and closer to Tyler, whom she soon learns actually uses his YouTube money to make boxed lunches for tornado victims, Mr. Beast-style. Sympathy for Influencers? Eh, sure. The former scholarship girl falling for the hot dude in a flannel makes Twisters only a slight twist on every Nicholas Sparks movie ever made.

Much has been written about Glen Powell and Daisy Edgar-Jones lacking chemistry, and that’s largely true, though the bigger issue might be that Edgar-Jones is simply miscast. She’s making a career out of being plucky, doe-eyed, and reticent, sort of the thinking person’s ingenue. That outward reticence tends to work well when it’s disguising an inner fire, but here there’s very little of that. She has a lot of Anne Hathaway qualities, but without some of the sublimated manic energy that usually makes Hathaway compelling. Kate needed some Tracy Flick energy, but it feels like they were so concerned about keeping her likable that she ends up being sort of nothing.

Meanwhile Glen Powell has his usual tiny upside down smiles for eyes and gets to wear a cowboy hat. I’m still not 100% sold on Powell as the Next Big Thing, but for now he’s just the himbo this script requires. Whatever else he might be capable of, he can definitely do “affable frat guy.”

The sexual tension between the two of them is meant to be a driving force of the film (while poor Javi plays the devoted, cuckolded Duckie), and the way Twisters nearly goes full rom-com at the end sort of sets us up for a consummation of Tyler and Kate’s relationship. Only in the end, it never comes (like Javi).

Supposedly it was a note from Spielberg that was responsible for the sort-of ambiguous ending. And it’s a good one. It’s in keeping with the “I love you/I know” school of filmmaking from whence Twisters sprung (George Lucas originally wrote Han as responding “I love you too”). It understands that this kind of movie isn’t really about human feelings and relationships, it’s almost entirely about building and subverting audience expectations, created by decades of other blockbusters. The relationship we’re more invested in is more between filmmaker and audience than between the two attractive people fleeing special effects. Do we even care if they have chemistry? I don’t think every film should strive for this (in fact I’d be glad if they didn’t) but it feels fitting that Twisters does.

Director Lee Isaac Chung (who, hilariously, comes to Twisters from the indie darling about Korean-American farmers, Minari) clearly knows his way around both action set pieces and wide open spaces. in Twisters, that’s enough. It’s the tornadoes, stupid. Twisters is a movie that knows what it is.