Twisters, the 28 year-old follow-up to the Jan De Bont disaster film, Twister (1996), stars Glen Powell and Daisy Edgar-Jones in a near replica to the original. The Lee Isaac Chung directed film is a fascinating detour for the mind behind 2020’s tranquil family drama, Minari. A peaceful portrait of life in the margins for a Korean American family that has moved to Arkansas in hopes of achieving their American Dream. There, Chung was focused on the generational gaps within the family, and how those wedges opened the doors for moving emotional conflict. Pivoting to Twisters, perhaps it is in Chung’s best interest to make one for ‘them’ so he can make one for him, but that doesn’t excuse the heap of shrapnel Twisters is.
It would be foolish to head into a Summer blockbuster expecting it to pack an emotional wallop as Minari did. Still, a trailer and marketing campaign sizzling on the trails blazed by Glen Powell’s path to stardom should achieve spectacularly intense heights for a rather dire season at the box office. With a cast including Anthony Ramos, Brandon Perea, Sasha Lane, Kiernan Shipka, David Corenswet, and Katy O’Brien, there is plenty of potential to turn the industry’s future stars into today’s cast of the moment. Yet, everyone is underutilized and done no service by Mark Smith’s aimless script.
In Twisters, there is an onslaught of tornados whipping through Oklahoma without rhyme or reason. Perhaps an allusion to climate change without saying as much, but the narrative force is cheap and weightless. There may be room to explore the intense ramifications of trying to wrangle an uncontrollable climate, but there appears to be no interest in implementing a narrative with purpose. The pieces are here with YouTube star Tyler Owens (Powell) and traumatically induced Kate (Edgar-Jones), but the story fails to use their mutual interest to display the effects their environment has had on them. Much of this has to do with the natural disasters acting as set dressing rather than the intense narrative obstacles they should be.
De Bont’s original film may not be as remarkable as we remember, but he still understood how to maximize the threat for the characters. Positioning any character near a life-threatening funnel of wind and debris sounds so easy, but Chung makes his tornadoes too tame. Even in a format as magnificent as IMAX, we are rarely afforded the opportunity to feel dwarfed by the incoming threat. Buildings are torn apart, cars tossed and people pulled from the ground, but these are consequences of an action we see, but hardly experience.
It’s clear the audience is supposed to experience these events through Kate and Tyler, but neither of them are emotionally compelling. Kate will grow and develop, but the route through those stages are emotionally underdressed and over delivered through bands of exposition. She’s often helped by characters appearing at just the right moment as if they were hurled through a tornado. This isn’t the first Summer blockbuster of 2024 to logistically cheat their own story, but it doesn’t make it any less egregious or annoying here. Perhaps the story is jam packed with carelessly detailed subplots about sleazy corporate cowboys with absolutely zero resolution. Just a hunch.
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