Familiar funnels

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This article was published 19/07/2024 (630 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Fans of the 1996 tornado movie Twister will be chuffed to see DOROTHY IV show up in the opening sequence of this storm-chasing sequel.

That slightly rusty data-collecting contraption is back because “it’s old and field-tested,” as one character points out, and the same could be said for the much-loved original movie.

The first Twister movie hit the B-movie sweet spot between scary and goofy (“We got cows”). This sequel, which comes more than a quarter-century later, is packed with callbacks to the ‘96 version, including a sartorial shout-out to Helen Hunt’s iconic white-tank-and-khakis look.

Overall, though, this newer, bigger project feels more ambitious but less effective. Scripted by Mark L. Smith and Joseph Kosinksi and directed by Lee Isaac Chung, Twisters delivers solid action set-pieces, stand-out special effects, and two remarkably good-looking and charismatic leads.

But this while this disaster flick works fairly well as a big summer blockbuster, it never quite matches the spark and fun and freshness of its ‘90s predecessor.

This could be because the script is so busy with fan service it doesn’t quite find its own thing. Or it could just be that more of us are now beset by climate anxiety, making it harder to turn the increasingly destructive effects of extreme weather into cinematic escapism.

The concise, attention-grabbing opener introduces us to Kate Carter (played with precise intensity by Daisy Edgar-Jones of Normal People). Kate is a tornado whisperer, with an instinct for how storms form and move.

Her crew, like Hunt and Bill Paxton’s gang in the ’96 version, is scruffy and underfunded and hepped on adrenaline. Within the first 10 minutes, they’ve successfully launched DOROTHY IV into an active tornado, something it took the entire running time of Twister to do.

Cue the Twister-y twist, though, as nature gets the last word. Following in the footsteps of Hunt, Kate soon has her very own F5 tornado-related trauma to grapple with.

Flash-forward five years and we see Kate has retreated into a safe meteorological desk job in New York City. When old friend and colleague Javi (Hamilton’s Anthony Ramos) shows up asking for a week of her time, she reluctantly returns to the field, heading to Oklahoma for what looks to be a record-busting storm season.

Javi is running a well-funded outfit — though there are ominous suggestions about where that funding might be coming from. They’ve got fancy equipment, neat uniforms, connections to government agencies such as FEMA and NOAA, and lots of PhDs.

The eccentric rival crew, led by Arkansas good ol’ boy Tyler Owens (Glen Powell, star of The Hit Man and current Internet Boyfriend), has a massive YouTube following, a line of tornado-themed merch and a popular call-and-response slogan: “If you feel it, chase it.”

Tyler’s bunch scoffs at academic credentials and makes fun of Javi’s protective eye gear.

If you’re worried about this devolving into a culture war between educated big-city, big-government elites and renegade “real Americans,” be assured that nothing is quite what it seems. As hidden motivations become clearer, the feuding Kate and Tyler fall into a (literal) whirlwind romance.

And yes, even when Tyler is doing things that ought to be obnoxious, Powell is just impossibly charming.

The film is filled with images that will be immediately familiar to fans of the original. There are convoys of trucks and vans driving down the flat roads of Tornado Alley country, taking lots of hard, sudden turns onto dirt tracks, doing lots of very, very fast backward driving.

There are similar story beats — a moment of comparative calm sharing a meal at an older relative’s house, an emergency involving a crowd of civilians, this time at a rodeo instead of a drive-in movie.

And there’s Ben (Harry Hadden-Paton), a British journalist, who replaces the original’s Jami Gertz in the thankless role of having absolutely normal and understandable fear reactions to life-threatening weather events, even as everyone around him is yelling “Yee-haw!” and pumping their fists.

Chung made his name with the small human drama Minari, but he moves to large-scale action with gusto. Along with uprooted powerlines and flying trucks — again, recognizable images from the first flick — there’s a spectacular scene of a massive twister hitting an oil refinery. With CGI effects upgraded from ’96, Chung delivers tornado footage that provokes apocalyptic awe.

At the same time, moving from the sheer beauty of the storms and the exhilaration of the tornado chasers to the human toll we see in footage of devastated communities is a tricky balancing act in 2024.

And for all its sensitivity to the weather, Twisters seems reluctant to acknowledge other atmospheric changes: references to climate change, social media and misinformation are so brief they barely register.

Instead of meaningfully updating the franchise for the present day, the filmmakers spend a lot of their time chasing the feeling of the 1996 original — and never quite catching it.

alison.gillmor@winnipegfreepress.com