Twisters is ‘underwhelming’ – and lacks twists

Though it features charismatic actors and thrilling sequences, Twisters doesn’t have much plot – instead, like its predecessor, “it just has bland characters driving into bad weather, over and over again”.

There aren’t many twists in Twisters. Twenty-eight years on from the release of Jan de Bont’s Twister, Hollywood’s powers-that-be have decided that this lucrative piece of intellectual property should be taken out for another spin, but they haven’t done anything surprising with it.

Like the 1996 film, the sequel features two rival teams of meteorologists: one is a scruffy bunch of rock’n’roll-loving misfits, the other a snobby, business-minded group with corporate funding. For research purposes, both teams like to get as close as they can to the tornadoes that keep ripping up picturesque all-American towns in Oklahoma, so they spend a lot of the film driving vans and pick-up trucks along country roads, yelling, “Where is it? I can’t see it!” (Hint: it’s the big whirly thing right in front of you.)

On each occasion, they get caught in a storm, at which point they start screaming, ducking debris, clinging on to each other, and generally acting like innocent victims in a disaster movie, while conveniently forgetting that it was their decision to drive into such a dangerous situation in the first place.

The new film makes only a few tweaks to the formula. In Twister, the savant who was lured back into the storm-chasing game was a man played by Bill Paxton. In Twisters, it’s a woman played by Daisy Edgar-Jones. In Twister, this character was a member of the rag-tag rebel band, but in Twisters, she joins the corporate team, because a friend of hers (Anthony Ramos) promises that his cutting-edge monitoring hardware will capture “the most perfect scan of a tornado ever”, which is, apparently, very important.

Still, there’s a chance that she might defect to the other gang, especially as it’s led by a swaggering, absurdly handsome cowboy played by Glen Powell, who seems at first to care about nothing except getting people to subscribe to his YouTube channel and buy his T-shirts, but who could well be revealed to be a brilliant scientist with a sensitive soul.

Another difference between the two films is that, quite far into Twisters, one of the teams decides that they’re not just going to scan tornadoes, they’re going to sap their strength using, I kid you not, the absorbent material from disposable nappies. But essentially the new film is a remake of the old one, so it seems oddly disrespectful that it doesn’t pay tribute to any of the original’s cast. Couldn’t they have got Helen Hunt in for a cameo? Couldn’t they have mentioned the characters played by the late Bill Paxton or the late Philip Seymour Hoffman?

The film’s co-writer, Joseph Kosinski, directed Top Gun: Maverick, another belated sequel that was deeply faithful to its predecessor. But can you imagine how strange it would have been if Tom Cruise’s Pete “Maverick” Mitchell wasn’t in it?

Efficiently directed by Lee Isaac Chung, who made the award-winning semi-autobiographical Minari, Twisters falls short of Twister in a couple of crucial ways: it doesn’t have Eddie Van Halen’s squealing guitars on the soundtrack, and it doesn’t have any shots of surprised-looking cows being flung through the sky. But it shares the previous film’s main flaw, which is that it doesn’t really have a plot – it just has bland characters driving into bad weather, over and over again.

Thanks to the charismatic actors and the vivid if not-quite-believable destruction, these hectic sequences are scary and thrilling enough, but they should be reserved for the start of a film (such as The Wizard of Oz) or the end of one (such as Steamboat Bill, Jr). They’re not varied enough to be repeated all the way through.

The problem is that there is no urgent narrative reason for the characters to put themselves in harm’s way, so there is no reason for the audience to cheer them on. The adrenaline-pumping music and the shouted dialogue is meant to fool us into thinking that we’re watching noble heroes going into battle against evil alien invaders. One character even says that tornadoes are “coming after the people we love”, and that “now we have the chance to fight back”. But the fact is that the storm-chasers aren’t fighting back – they’re researching the weather. And while that’s a perfectly laudable occupation, we’ve come to expect a little more from our blockbuster heroes.

More like this:

This underwhelming aspect of Twisters is most obvious at the end. When the characters survive yet another cyclone, the implication is that they have somehow triumphed over their enemy and that everyone will live happily ever after. Before that, though, the script made it clear that catastrophic whirlwinds are a daily occurrence in Oklahoma, so another one might be along any minute. We’re left with the question of what, exactly, the characters have achieved. How much of a difference has all their driving and shouting actually made?

The film does have a villain of sorts, a nefarious tycoon who profits from all the chaos by buying up storm-battered land at knockdown prices. But the protagonists don’t do anything to foil his plans. There is also a brief acknowledgement that man-made climate change may be responsible for the proliferation of tornadoes. But, again, this provocative environmental theme is soon forgotten. It’s a missed opportunity. Twisters isn’t bad, but a braver film might have admitted that addressing the causes of extreme weather might be more useful than throwing nappies at it.

★★★☆☆

Twisters is released on 19 July.