Back Around Again

Does anyone actually like the 1996 big budget blockbuster Twister? I remember when it came out it was super popular, but most of the advertising at the time focused on just how realistic the tornado in the film was. Not the story, not the characters; the tornado. And, don’t get me wrong, it was an impressive tornado. Rendered with CGI, it was considered the next big technological marvel on the big screen after the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park (and it’s no small coincidence that Spielberg directed that film and his production company, Amblin Entertainment, worked on Twister). The film made a stupid amount of money upon its release, hauling in $495.7 Mil against its $92 Mil budget. It was a huge success.

And then pretty much everyone forgot about it soon after. The whole thing about how the hype was for the tornado in the film, and no one really talked about the story or the characters? Yeah, that’s because the actual plot of the film is pretty basic and all the characters (while played by charismatic actors) are horribly one note. A team of tornado chasers want to test a new device to map the interior of a tornado, and then, by the time the film wraps, they do it. That’s the plot. For all the carnage, and awesome tornado effects the film sports, the actual plot is as basic as it gets. Once you got past the spectacle, the oohs and ahhs that drew butts to seats in theaters, the replayability of the film was pretty well non-existent.

While, sure, you could say the same about Jurassic Park, that film had more staying power by grace of the fact that dinosaurs are far more interesting than tornadoes. Dinosaurs are characters, they are animals with intent. The velociraptors in the film were built up as real villains. You were invested in seeing if the “bad guys” (the dinosaurs, among other villains in the film) succeeded or not. Tornadoes, though, are just forces of nature. They don’t have personality, they’re random, freak events. You can’t build them up like villains in the same way, and that mutes the ability to get invested and to care.

All of that is why it took so long for a sequel to Twister to come about. Bill Paxton, star of the original film, pushed hard for a sequel, and for years and years he was trying to get one made until, ultimately, his death squashed much hope. Almost thirty years later we did finally get one, with none of the cast, none of the characters, and none of the connection to the original film, in effect. It’s a sequel practically in name only, with only the tornadoes themselves coming back, in essence. Another storm season, another well rendered set of cyclones coming to cause carnage in Oklahoma. It’s a sequel, but only if you squint and stare at it from the right perspective.

Kate Carter (Daisy Edgar-Jones) is a meteorological student and storm chaser. She and her crew of friends – boyfriend Jeb (Daryl McCormack), best friend Addy (Kiernan Shipka), working partner Praveen (Nik Dodani), and tech lead Javi (Anthony Ramos) – have a technological solution to tornadoes, a chemical mix that, upon release into a cyclone, could reduce its strength and, likely, cause it to dissipate. However, when they track a storm front that could create a low-level tornado, they get caught in it when it suddenly intensifies past the safety threshold for their study. The chemicals release, but have no effect, and the crew get trapped in the path of the tornado, which leads to the deaths of Addy, Praveen, and Jeb. Kate is so shaken that she drops out of the PhD program and quits storm chasing altogether.

Five years later, Javi trackers her down. Kate’s been working for the NOAA office in New York, using her storm knowledge and gift for tracking storms to help predict weather issues on the Eastern Seaboard. Javi needs her help, though. He has a new technical solution that could aid in tracking and mapping storms, and he needs her gift for storm tracking to aid his project. She reluctantly agrees, but their project almost immediately hits a rough skid when a rival team of storm chasers, led by online sensation Tyler "The Tornado Wrangler" Owens (Glen Powell), gets in their way. Plus, Kate’s PTSD still prevents her from being able to work properly as a storm chaser. Can Kate pull it together? Is she even working on the right project? And when the tornadoes come, is anyone really safe?

I haven’t watched Twister in years but I can still remember the basic beats of it because, again, that film is stupidly simplistic. For a nearly two hour film about tornadoes, there isn’t much in the way of plotting or characters that matter. Team goes out, tries to use a device to map a tornado, it fails, they try again, get caught in the path of a mega-cyclone, tech succeeds, heroes survive, case closed. I remember all of it and I was reminded of all of it again because, would you look at that, Twisters (the sequel) is a carbon copy of Twister (the original), just with different characters and an “s” slapped at the end.

Like, seriously, this film is so beholden to the beats of the original film that if you took tracing paper and drew over the original you’d still have a hard time creating a closer clone than Twisters. Kate has a tragic backstory, just like original heroine Jo Harding. There’s a special device – Dorothy in the original, Scarecrow, Lion, Tin Man, and Wizard collectively in the sequel – designed to map a tornado. The device the heroine creates (her special chemical concoction) fails the first time, succeeds later. There’s wrangling and tornado chasing and a whole lot of country twang. It’s the same film all over again, just with younger actors.

And here’s the thing: I might not care that much for the original Twister, finding it pretty shallow and simplistic, but the film handles its one job very well. It does, in fact, create one hell of an on screen tornado. If that’s what you want to see, then you have all you need in the original movie. The CGI effects are still great, they hold up just fine thirty years later, so if you wanna see storm chasers go after a tornado, the 1996 Twister works just fine. A carbon-copy, in name only sequel that does the same thing, the same way, with similar effects, isn’t really necessary since it doesn’t do anything better or different than the original.

And, honestly, the sequel feels generically worse. Kate, despite her tragic backstory and PTSD plotting, is a barely sketched character. She has one basic motivation, “let’s put chemicals into a tornado,” and her character arc starts and ends there. Even her PTSD is quickly dismissed, only coming up once and then fading away through sudden, unmentioned grit and determination. Or because a hunky guy is around. Glen Powell is stupidly charismatic in this film and almost makes the movie watchable on his own, even if his character is just as thinly developed.

Watching the film you can already guess the major beats before they happen. Nothing about this movie is shocking or interesting, and one solid actor (Powell) really can’t save an otherwise empty and threadbare film. The only thing the movie really does well is depict tornado action, and even then it’s just doing what the previous film did, but not as well. It’s a copy of a better film, done thirty years later because someone still had a license and thought they could wring money out of it. They did, but not as much, with Twisters only making $372.3 Mil against its $155 Mil budget (which, by Hollywood math, means it didn’t even break even).

Is the film fun at times? Sure. It has moments that are enjoyable, and there are times where Powell comes on screen and manages to live his scenes and elevate the other (honestly quite bland) actors around him. Some scenes work, some interactions are fun, some moments of tornado carnage are interesting. None of it, though, is enough to make this a successful film, and it absolutely isn’t as good as 1996’s Twister which, again, was already a hollow and empty film. The new Twisters is a bog-standard Hollywood blockbuster for our current era: pretty at first glance, giving the expected Hollywood beats, with quips and smiles and at least one charismatic actor. But like most of Hollywood’s current blockbuster output, it’s empty of anything that matters. Five minutes after you’ve watched it you’ve already forgotten most of it. If anything sticks with you it’s that there were some cool tornadoes in it.

Which, end of the day, is probably a fitting legacy for a Twister sequel. Hollow, empty, and quickly forgotten, just like the original.