Twisters: a whirlwind of disaster movie clichés

“We got to get everybody into the movie theatre,” someone shouts towards the end of Twisters, and you could be forgiven for thinking they were shouting Warner Brothers’ market strategy into the gale. Lee Isaac Chung’s windy tentpole disaster movie is the kind of spectacle – like Top Gun: Maverick (2022) and Oppenheimer (2023) – that demands to be seen on the big screen. So far, so summer blockbuster, and the film is desperate to reproduce the thrills of Twister, Jan de Bont’s 1996 original; but will it blow us away?

An opening prologue sees university grad Kate Cooper (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and her perky university pals, among them data nut Javi (Anthony Ramos), chasing a tornado in Oklahoma to test Kate’s theory that you can “tame tornadoes” by shooting polymers into the vortices. Tragically, the encounter turns deadly. Five years later, Kate is working in New York when the call to adventure arrives: Javi shows up and explains his new system of 3D modelling (demonstrated using a glass of water and some portions of creamer). Back in Oklahoma, a once-in-a-generation tornado season is brewing which – though bad news for people who want their lives and property intact – makes for hilarious high jinks for YouTubers and amateur storm-chasers. Javi and his highly professional outfit Storm Par are corporate and serious: well-financed, high-tech, and as evil as their matching headgear and leisure-smart outfits suggest.

Their rivals are the self-styled Tornado Wranglers, led by Glen Powell’s Tyler Owens, a country-punk outfit who arrive in chunky, beaten-up vehicles. If the Millennium Falcon was a Jeep, it’d be this. Eighty percent of their dialogue is “Wooooo!” and “Yeah!” with the occasional “Woohoo!” to add nuance. Though his skills are hidden at the outset, later scenes reveal Powell to be the great actor we saw not long ago in Richard Linklater’s Hit Man (2023). Jones and Powell manage to give their wafer-thin characters charm and likeability, and Ramos does his best with what’s left, but the script is a collection of placeholders between set pieces, featuring such tried and tested lines as “Have you seen the size of that thing?” and “I thought I could make a difference.” Edgar- Jones even says “This isn’t my first rodeo” while she’s at a rodeo – though, granted, that could be a self-own, tacitly admitting to the hackneyed approach.

But am I examining the teacup when you’ve obviously come for the storms? Here too, though, the action feels like it’s on a downward spiral, even as the James Cameron-inspired pluralising of the title suggests multiplication. Twisters is not a sequel to the de Bont film (though it gives a tip of the hat by casting Bill Paxton’s son James Paxton in a cameo), and has none of its restraint. De Bont started proceedings with a genuinely haunting prologue, in which the audience only heard a tornado. Here, we start big and we go bigger. Fireworks are blasted into tornadoes; tornadoes crash into chemical plants and explode to create fire-nadoes. The result is that you’re always aware you’re watching great CGI. A drone is introduced for no real purpose and provides nothing new visually.

Perhaps the problem is the weather, which also beleaguered the original. How do you take an anti-narrative – something as non-linear and impersonal as weather events – and turn it into a story with protagonists and villains? The 1970s had a spate of disaster movies which perfected the template, making the disaster the star and everyone else the supporting cast. In Twisters, Kate is intent on saving the heartland of America represented by her farmer mother (Maura Tierney) and a small town that might as well be called Americana. Storms have been getting worse, we learn – but climate change seems to be a sticky topic and the science-y team are the villains. Kate is somewhere in between – she’s been to college but makes her predictions by sniffing (“The air feels heavy”) and watching out for tell-tale signs. Still, the semiotics side with the climate deniers. Our heroes hurtle round in gas-guzzling motor vehicles while wind farms get ripped from the ground and turned into deadly airborne knives. Twisters isn’t so much about confronting climate change as enjoying it.

 ► Twisters is in UK cinemas now.