By Sandra Hall
TWISTERS ★★★½
(M) 122 minutes
The 1996 tornado movie Twister is fondly remembered for one of the genre’s great movie moments. It has Helen Hunt and her fellow storm chasers watching open-mouthed as an airborne cow passes across their car windscreen.
Glen Powell plays cowboy scientist Tyler, opposite Daisy Edgar-Jones’ meteorologist Kate.
In Twisters, the film’s belated standalone sequel, there are no flying cows, although there is cameo by a windblown chook landing dazed on a car bonnet. The air traffic also has more weight and volume this time around and global warming has entered the equation, but the broad narrative thrust is the same.
In the original, the turbulent sexual tensions between Hunt and Bill Paxton, as her ex-husband, work in tandem with the surrounding weather patterns. In this one, Daisy Edgar-Jones (Normal People), cast as an experienced meteorologist, is drawn into a rocky relationship with Glen Powell (Hit Man), playing a storm-chasing blow-in, a thrill-seeker who’s tracking the tornado by way of entertaining his social media followers. Lightning strikes as a result.
Once again, the action takes place on the Oklahoma plains, Steven Spielberg is listed as an executive producer and the script features some neatly nostalgic references to the original. The only surprise is the identity of the director – Lee Isaac Chung, best known for Minari, an endearingly quiet and thoughtful film inspired by his childhood as the son of South Korean immigrants making a new life for themselves on a farm in Arkansas.
Edgar-Jones and Anthony Ramos walk through the wreckage in Twisters.
There are few quiet moments here. As the storm warnings gather, Edgar-Jones’ Kate Cooper is urged to leave her well-paid desk job in New York to return to her home state of Oklahoma. Her friend, Javi (Anthony Ramos), is bent on persuading Kate that her scientific expertise is essential if the home team is to succeed in testing a new device designed to track the path of the approaching catastrophe.
Kate is reluctant. As a young science student, she lost several close friends while storm-chasing, but she soon comes round and just as predictably, Powell’s Tyler Owens, the social media cowboy, proves to be not as silly as his smirk suggests.
Before long, he and Kate are bonding over storm cell behaviour and precipitation figures – a form of romantic repartee which doesn’t quite measure up even by today’s romcom standards. Consequently, it’s a relief when the array of projectiles gradually builds up, starting with the customary series of somersaulting cars and trucks, moving on to the detached wing of a wind turbine and climaxing with bits of an oil refinery set on fire by the winds.
The scale and speed of it all is terrifying. There is no doubting the inexorable power of one of these disasters. It’s all up on the screen. But the script fails to make much sense of the mix of actual science and sci-fi speculation behind the meteorologists’ hair-raising efforts to collapse the tornado, or at least moderate its impact.
Even while cowering in my seat, I couldn’t banish my preoccupation with the ridiculousness of it all. When somebody remarks, “It’s the wild west out here”, they’re simply stating the obvious, given the presence of Tyler’s cowboy hat, his whooping and hollering team of followers, and the country and western songs resonating on the soundtrack.
By the time the plot gets around to dealing with the misery and destruction left after the disaster, it’s too late. The enormity of the tragedy may be there on the ground but buying into the storm-chasers’ po-faced assertions that it’s time to leave the heroics behind and settle down to helping its victims was beyond me.
Twisters is released in cinemas on July 11.
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