by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $13.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Glen Powell, Daisy Edgar-Jones, Anthony Ramos, Sasha Lane
Intro:
… a serviceable disaster flick with well-made set pieces and a commendable mission statement for its own genre.
One of the more noteworthy moments from 1999’s Twister was a disaster scene set at a drive-in theatre, with Jack Nicholson’s classic kill-crazy face lingering over the visage of the tornado as it tore through the landscape. About as subtle as having the twister growl like a creature from a completely different Amblin production (which also happened), but a fitting encapsulation of how that film viewed the titular threat – this murderous, unknowable, terrifying force that seems mad-bent on tearing as many families apart as it can muster.
This decades-removed follow-up has its own version of this scene, and it likewise highlights the difference in tact. Jack Napier’s serial killer grin is replaced with the birth of Frankenstein, likening the now-multiplied tornadoes to another misunderstood child of lightning that, while also capable of great harm, is just as much the product of mankind’s treatment of it as it is of its own detachment from us.
In essence, what director Lee Isaac Chung (Minari) and writer Mark L. Smith (The Revenant, Overlord) are attempting here is to bring the crucial human element back into the modern disaster genre; the hope of survival, as opposed to the thrill of destruction. Revive an emotional conscience worn down from so many years of Emmerich and Emmerich-inspired disaster flicks, where thinking was optional and total devastation was meant to be fun first and foremost.
Of course, as any Buffyverse fan will attest, having a conscience and having a soul aren’t inherently the same thing. While the Van Halen guitars and mood of ‘natural disaster by way of adventure/slasher hybrid’ have been removed, what replaces them is dishearteningly bland. In updating the original, all the right steps are ostensibly taken, bringing in modern concerns about climate change and monetary grifting in the guise of disaster relief. But in actually delivering the urgency of why Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones) is so determined to ‘tame the twister’, and the stakes behind that mission, the whole film pales in comparison to just a single scene of Helen Hunt’s Jo railing against the faultless injustice of her house getting hit when others didn’t.
It doesn’t help that the characters here, in spite of that attempted realignment, also fall short. Admittedly, the original ran into this problem too, with only a handful of memorable presences amongst the central crowd, but in the reshuffling of the most memorable traits between them (survivor’s guilt, rekindling old passions, living for the rush of the chase), we somehow have fewer memorable characters here. Edgar-Jones gets by just on being in a film about death and nature that isn’t Where The Crawdads Sing, Anthony Ramos’ Javi brings one of his weakest performances to date, and as for Glen Powell as the YouTube cowboy Tyler… well, apart from being the setup to a painfully predictable twist on audience expectations, there’s an odd Mr. Beast undertone to his presence here that muddies the waters a bit. He feels like a feeble attempt to, in the middle of course-correcting how disaster movies function emotionally, reassure the audience that having fun with tornadoes and special effects is still a-okay. If you can’t stay woke, don’t set the alarm.
Okay, despite how negative this is likely coming across, Twisters really isn’t that bad. It’s a serviceable disaster flick with well-made set pieces and a commendable mission statement for its own genre. But in comparison to how high it aims, and how well its predecessor did at a lot of what it’s attempting without giving up on the entertainment value, the letdown might be difficult to overlook for those with a particular attachment to the original. It promises an EF5 but only gets to around an EF3.
