Twister is one of those summer popcorn flicks I have fond memories of watching, often with lots of ad breaks, with my father. It’s one of those films that has a great pace, which makes sense given that its director, Jan de Bont, previously directed Speed. So, I did not contain my excitement when I saw the first theatrical trailer for Twisters, to the annoyance of my usual theater companion.
Full disclosure, I enjoy what people would call disaster films. Jurassic Park is one of my all-time favourite movies, and I have watched White House Down more than once. I am the market for this kind of movie. That said even my love doesn’t guarantee blind loyalty. Case in point, I saw the first Jurassic World movie but haven’t seen any of its sequels. So when I say that my first screening of Twisters did not disappoint and that I’m already excitedly anticipating my second experience on a bigger screen, there is still some weight behind that.
Twisters is not a direct sequel or reboot, but rather a standalone sequel. There is one big nod to Twister in the first sequence, but other than that, the similarities are more structural and homage-related. Most notably the two movies both begin and end with EF-5 (F-5) tornados, a tornado destroys a theatre, and both female leads begin the film experiencing trauma from a tornado. However, how the traumas experienced and the reactions are different thus setting some of the major differences between the films.
While Twister did not shy away from showing the destruction, it shied away from looking into the trauma and the community toll the tornados take. Twisters, is fully invested in the destruction caused by tornados. We enter the world with a sequence that results in Kate (played by Daisy Edgar-Jones), traumatized and abandoning storm chasing until her old friend and teammate (Javi played by Anthony Ramos) pulls her back 5 years later. But the film also looks unflinchingly at the aftermath of the destruction on communities hit and those that take advantage of them, while also looking at perception/bias – particularly in Kate’s initial view of Glen Powell’s Tyler Owens’ rowdy, video making, merch-selling, “tornado wrangler” crew and her one of Javi’s straight-laced corporate research crew that she’s joined. Both films had a two-crew dynamic, but Twister‘s leads were both a part of the high-energy rag-tag crew, and the corporate crew was only used as a foil. Hence, this creates a different weighted dynamic between these structurally similar elements and pits the leads in conflict in a way not initially rooted in romance. I think this worked well to up some of the dramatic and overall narrative stakes, but, because we did have to spend more time with the corporate crew you did lose out on some of the real estate the first film was able to afford to the rest of the rag-tag crew, which is a shame as the “tornado wranglers” were made up of some fine talents in Brandon Perea, Sasha Lane, Tunde Adebimpe, Katy O’Brian, and Harry Hadden-Paton as the journalist profiling them.
Director Lee Isaac Chung and his cinematographer Dan Mindel shot on film to better capture the nature of the colours of Oklahoma in the way that film can, and in doing so, the look of the film is a lot more similar to Twister than a lot of sequel films that have been made of other films from this era. In fact, in the first sequence, until they pulled out their phones and laptops, I would have believed if the film had been set only a few years after the first film.
Twisters opens in theaters on July 17th, if you even mildly enjoy these kinds of movies, do yourself a favour, and see it on the biggest screen possible.
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