Riding the Whirlwind

When Warner rolled out its 4K upgrade of Twister earlier this summer, I was pleasantly surprised to find Jan de Bont’s ’90s blockbuster held up better than I expected, its crackerjack cast and cheerful joyride vibe compensating for the simplistic script and lack of any real stakes. A lot of stuff gets smashed but nobody we like gets hurt; what more did people want from a summer movie? (Also, thanks to de Bont completely overhauling the color grade for the 4K remaster, the movie looks absolutely stunning now.)

So what did they do for an encore? Nothing. Twister was a self-contained story, taking place over a couple of days and ending with everyone happy and safe, their theories validated and personal issues resolved. And that was fine! Not every movie needs to launch a franchise, and it’s telling that Independence Day, Twister’s only true rival for the 1996 box-office crown, was similarly designed as a one-and-done.

But this is the age of IP, and no success can go unharvested. Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich made Independence Day: Resurgence in 2016, and shat the bed spectacularly with a deeply dopey sequel that satisfied no one; maybe that’s why it took another eight years for someone to take a run at following up Twister.

Or maybe it was just that Lee Isaac Chung needed to make Minari in the interim.

Chung is not the guy I would have expected to make a gargantuan effects movie. He’s a thoughtful, emotional filmmaker who makes small, intimate dramas. But he knows the American plains, and he knows how to infuse familiar narratives with interesting, even surprising detail, and so … yeah, what the hell, let the man make a Twister sequel.

And I will give him full credit: With Chung in the driver’s seat, Twisters pulls off something really interesting. It understands the expectations of its legacy audience, and leans into them in a way that doesn’t feel repetitive or insulting. Without apology, it is the previous film: Beat for beat, relationship for relationship, Twisters is Twister. But better.

It’s not a direct sequel, which is the thing that really matters. The only thing carried over from the first film is Dorothy, the sensor technology Bill and Jo Harding had developed to understand tornado behavior. It turns up in Twisters’ prologue, which is the only continuity we need.

Chung’s hero, Kate Carter (Daisy Edgar-Jones) is a new character, and definitively not the daughter of Bill and Jo Harding … though I’d be willing to bet that was the case in one of Joseph Kosinski and/or Mark L. Smith’s earlier drafts. She has the same innate understanding of tornado behavior that Bill did – and thanks to that prologue, she has the same survivor guilt that drove Jo to take ever bigger risks in the name of research.

In fact, the trauma of losing her friends in a botched field test drove Kate away from storm-chasing … until her old friend Javi (Anthony Ramos) comes calling five years later to beg Kate to join him in Tornado Alley for a week to map twisters with cutting-edge military radar that might lead to a proper early-warning defense against catastrophic damage and loss of life. Of course she’s in.

No sooner has Kate arrived in Oklahoma than she meets Tyler Owens (Glen Powell), a freewheeling cowboy with a YouTube channel and a goofy gang of storm chasers who love shooting fireworks up a twister’s butts for lolz or clout or whatever. (The kids today, I tell you what.) Kate dislikes Tyler’s swagger; Tyler doubts Kate’s skills. Of course they’re perfect for each other, and the pair’s mistrust turning into attraction the real spine of the picture, Chung capturing Kate and Tyler’s growing connection against the sprawl of the American heartland. It sounds hokey but that’s not how it plays; Edgar-Jones and Powell just sort of line up with one another, developing a relationship based on mutual respect as well as old-school chemistry.

It’s one of several elements from the original Twister that’s given an upgrade here: We never really saw Bill and Jo as a functional couple, just as cranky exes remembering why they got together in the first place. Twisters starts its romance fresh, letting its leads discover each other while charging into increasingly dangerous situations, and that’s a lot of fun.

About those dangerous situations: Yep, Twisters also offers a nighttime tornado attack on a crowded outdoor venue – a rodeo here, replacing the original’s drive-in – and a daybreak tour of a devastated town. But things are a little more serious this time around, with a bystander body count that suggests our heroes might actually come to harm in this one. Tension! It’s actually a good thing!

And what about the slobs-versus-snobs conflict from the first movie? Who’s the Cary Elwes this time around, you’re wondering? Well, Twisters has thought about that too, and the film is reasonably clever about the way it hides its baddies in plain sight. It even couches some modest social commentary in the way the white establishment makes people of color complicit in their own exploitation, which makes me even more certain Chung took a pass at the script.

And just as Twister packed its supporting cast with character actors who could find a variety of ways to look into the middle distance, Twisters boasts a whole bunch of up and comers: In addition to Edgar-Jones and Powell carrying this thing, and Ramos doing a fine job alongside them, Chung drops Nope’s Brandon Perea, American Honey’s Sasha Lane, Love Lies Bleeding’s Katy O’Brian and Tunde Adebimpe into Tyler’s crew, casts The Greatest Hits’ David Corenswet as Javi’s square-jawed business partner and finds key roles for Kiernan Shipka, Maura Tierney and Good Luck to You, Leo Grande’s David McCormack. Everybody’s interesting, and the film is so much better for it.

Speaking of which: Yes, Twisters was shot on actual film, and it looks great in Universal’s 4K release. Chung and DP Dan Mindel don’t do anything fancy with the colors or the texture; the goal is to make things look as realistic as possible, the better to ground the story in a recognizable world. Which isn't to say Edgar-Jones and Powell can’t have great lighting when the moment calls for it, of course:

Advancements in CGI also mean the twister effects are a little more organic this time, meaning we don’t experience them as the outsized monsters of de Bont’s original. They're still intense, but this time around people have the sense to keep their distance. Mostly.

The sequel’s shift in perspective might have something to do with the crew’s experience of destructive storms during the shoot: One of the featurettes on the disc examines how filming on location meant numerous weather delays – one of which left everyone taking shelter as a storm trashed a street-fair set which had to be rebuilt from scratch so they could destroy it all over again.

Or possibly it’s just the difference between de Bont’s bombast and Chung’s inclination towards naturalism: If a tornado is coming straight at you and your friends, does it matter if it’s an EF4 or an EF5? It’s a freaking tornado!

Anyway, that’s Twisters, a textbook case of a movie no one needed that turned out to be pretty solid entertainment. I wasn’t blown away, exactly, but I liked it a lot more than I expected to. Color me impressed.

Twisters is now available in 4K/BD and BD/DVD combo editions from Universal Studios Home Entertainment. A DVD edition is also available.

Up next: Paid subscribers can look forward to Friday’s What’s Worth Watching update– c’mon, upgrade to paid! – and I unlock the secrets of Arrow’s new Hellraiser collection on the weekend. Stay tuned.