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TWISTERS
Director: Lee Isaac Chung Cast: Daisy Edgar-Jones, Glen Powell, Anthony Ramos, Brandon Perea, Maura Tierney, Harry Hadden-Paton, Sasha Lane, Daryl McCormack, Kiernan Shipka, Nik Dodani, David Corenswet, Tunde Adebimpe, Katy O'Brian, David Born MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 1:57 Release Date: 7/19/24 |
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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 18, 2024 Say what you will about Twister, but the 1996 blockbuster had a sense of humor about itself and a sense of spectacle that almost overshadowed its thin excuses of a plot and characters. Twisters, a sequel in name only, is so self-serious that it barely bothers with the excuses for its occasional spectacle. Everyone who saw the first movie remembers the flying cow almost 30 years later, but it's tough to imagine anything in this one being memorable a month from now. That might be a generous estimate, too. Before the memory fades, here's the gist of the plot, which basically does the same thing as the original but with a slightly different twist. A team of student storm chasers, led by Kate Carter (Daisy Edgar-Jones), have developed a theoretical means of stopping a tornado. It involves dumping barrels of absorbent powder—like the stuff in diapers, one of the students proudly exclaims—into the twister, which should soak up all of the moisture in the storm and deplete the tornado of its fuel. Could such a thing work? One imagines someone in the real world has considered such an idea, but tornadoes are still common occurrences, as well as increasingly frequent and stronger ones in recent years (The movie acknowledges this is happening but, oddly, doesn't even hint at the obvious reason why). No one's watching a big-budget movie about the destructive power of very bad weather for pseudo-science, though, and that's a thought screenwriter Mark L. Smith might have considered before filling this one with so much talk about it. Either way, the tornado-stopping plan essentially means the only piece of plot here amounts to the same sort of action as that in the first movie, in which the characters attempted to use barrels of sensors to be sucked into the funnel in order to collect data to better track the storms (It must not have worked, given that the warning systems in the movie's world haven't changed in the ensuing decades). Characters track down a tornado as it's forming, get as close to it as possible, and try to set up equipment before it gets too close. The filmmakers must have realized the potential for a feeling of overt familiarity with this, so later, the characters track down a tornado, get as close as possible, and lay down equipment other than barrels. They're radar devices that might make a more accurate three-dimensional model of a tornado. That's amusing on two levels. First, the action of the movie revolves around accurate-looking-and-behaving computer models of tornadoes, so what's the point, really? Second, Smith and director Lee Isaac Chung's attempts to change things up from the first movie wind up making the plot of the sequel even closer to that of its predecessor. Things really can stay the same with more change. Since no one does or should care about this nonsense, let's just get to the main attractions. The tornadoes here are generally impressive on a visual level, especially since Chung is working with more advanced visual effects than existed three decades ago. Beyond that, the director has a sharp eye for capturing the scope and the chaos of such storms, keeping the camera at a distance to show their formation against the landscapes of Oklahoma. When the characters do get close, the frame fills with so much rain, hail, dust, and flying debris that not even Kate, who has an almost-preternatural ability to predict exactly where a tornado will form and what direction it will take, can immediately spot it. There are several such sequences here, each one escalating in stakes and destruction. The first one kills off Kate's entire team, save for her and Javi (Anthony Ramos), who calls her back to Oklahoma from New York City five years later to help him with the radar devices. He's currently working with a real estate developer, which at least results in a minor subversion of the original movie's dumbest conceit: a group of bad-guy storm chasers. The initial human antagonist here is Tyler Owens (Glen Powell), a self-proclaimed "tornado wrangler" who's seemingly in the game for social media views and money. Because Kate is single after the prologue and Powell is too charming to be such a straightforward villain, there's more to Tyler than Kate originally believes, although it's difficult to buy the movie's concern for the human toll of tornadoes in a few scenes. After all, the destruction of whole towns and the sight of people being sucked into the dusty funnels are key components of the material's attempts at thrilling spectacle. It doesn't help that—apart from the traumatized Kate, the secretly somber Tyler, and the eventually conflicted Javi—none of the characters on the rival storm-chasing teams possesses much, if any, personality. Such a move, perhaps, might get in the way of the strangely solemn tone and explanatory dialogue. No, the real stars of Twisters are the eponymous storms. When they show up, the movie fulfills its sole purpose well enough, but that's not quite an excuse for the rest of it. Copyright © 2024 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
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(for intense action and peril, some language and injury images)
