Reap the Whirlwind

This is how to do a legacy sequel. 

Twisters, arriving nearly 30 years after Jan de Bont’s original Twister, knows there’s no use continuing the story of tornado chaser Dr. Jo Harding and her one-time weatherman husband Bill Harding. 

Twisters also knows that the Hardings and the adrenaline-junkie antics of their crew were the biggest special effects of the original. The new film is grounded in a character-first, tornadoes second ethos, and that makes it even more awe-inducing when those modern-day F5s touch down.

Not in Kansas anymore

Twisters takes place in the same universe as Twister, but the only character the two films share isn’t even human—it’s Dorothy, Jo Harding’s state-of-the-art (for 1996) tornado warning system. But there are plenty of callbacks to the original that will make fans grin without alienating new viewers.

This time around, Kate Cooper (Daisy Edgar-Jones) is a tornado chaser on a mission. She and her crew aren’t just using Dorothy to warn people about tornadoes; they’re trying to stop tornadoes as they form. (This involves a lot of meteorological jargon that I assume is correct, since one character accurately explains what “the cap” is, but who knows.) 

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TWISTERS ★★★★ (4/5 stars)
Directed by: Lee Isaac Chung
Written by: Mark L. Smith, Joseph Kosinski
Starring: Daisy Edgar-Jones, Glen Powell, Anthony Ramos, Brandon Perea, Maura Tierney
Running time: 117 mins

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It turns out that Kate has more tornado trauma than Jo Harding; her technology fails at a crucial moment in the middle of an F5, and Kate loses all but one of her crew. She stops chasing storms, stops researching and goes to work analyzing storms at the National Weather Service in New York, far away from her home in Oklahoma.

When Javi (Anthony Ramos), the only other surviving member of her crew, visits Kate with a job opportunity, she briefly hesitates before taking him up on it. The new gig involves gathering data on a new cluster of tornadoes for Javi’s federally-funded startup, in a nice twist on the “science vs. money” conflict of the original Twister. Kate is like if Bill went to work for a more altruistic-seeming Dr. Jonas Miller. Of course she’s going to go. She loves to chase. More importantly, she wants to help other people.

‘You don’t face your fears…you ride ‘em’

But this is 2024, not 1996. “Everyone with a $10 weather app” chases tornadoes now, as one character laments. And the biggest tornado chaser of them all is Tyler Owens (Glen Powell), a bullrider-turned-YouTube-tornado-chaser who calls himself a “professional tornado wrangler.” His crew chases for the thrill of it, which annoys Kate. Will these two crazy kids learn to put aside their differences to help save people and stop a tornado when disaster strikes? The answer is about as predictable as the weather.

It is here that I will mention that Twisters’ greatest special effect is Glen Powell. The audience is invested in Kate’s story, but the movie doesn’t get going with full force until Tyler rolls in like a storm, blaring country music in a pickup and then autographing T-shirts that feature his face. Powell plays him like if Matthew McConaughey woke up one day and decided to become a meteorologist. He even has his own version of “All right, all right, all right” with “If you feel it…chase it!”

The way Tyler and Kate react to each other’s roguishness and scientific approach, respectively, form the main conflict of the film. The script, credited to Mark L. Smith and Top Gun: Maverick director Joseph Kosinski, always prioritizes the storm chasers and the ordinary people who are left in each tornado’s wake. Director Lee Isaac Chung shoots those ordinary people and their land with the same reverence and regional specificity he gave the farmland in Minari—he loves to linger on shots of crops and close-ups of actors’ faces. The varied Oklahoma landscapes get the same Amblin awe treatment as the tornadoes.

More twisters, more problems

And when those tornadoes hit, they’re filmed with a sense of Spielbergian wonder that I haven’t seen on screen in a long time, even though it seems Twisters uses less practical sets than Twister. There’s one scene where two characters take shelter in an empty hotel pool that I can’t stop thinking about. It takes a lot to top the “We got cows” scene in the original, but a few moments come close. There is a lot of destruction in this movie.

Twisters also subtly comments on our modern-day extreme weather predicament. Nobody says the words “climate change” or “global waring,” but they don’t need to—the fact that these characters are beyond trying to warn people about storms and are instead trying to kill tornadoes says it all. And if Twisters has a villain besides Mother Nature, it’s predatory insurance companies that swoop in after each disaster, promising families false hope while gobbling up cheap land.

Would I have liked to learn a little bit more about Tyler’s backstory? Sure. Is the Kate-Tyler-Javi pseudo-love-triangle a bit half-assed? Yeah. Does Daisy Edgar-Jones’ Oklahoma accent come and go like the rain? Also yes. But those are really the only quibbles I have with this movie. 

Twisters manages to be its own movie while also being a complete ‘90s throwback. Overall, it plays like an honest-to-God, crowd-pleasing blockbuster, one that should cement Glen Powell’s leading man status, give Daisy Edgar-Jones a bigger platform in Hollywood, and allow Lee Isaac Chung more latitude to make whatever he wants. It should be the hit of the summer.