'Twisters' briefing

2 (out of 4)

             Can you really claim a plural title (à la Aliens) when your dumber sequel features half the cyclones spinning in 1996? Jesus, I don’t think there’s a single way in which this soft remake (so soft it's barely holding together) isn’t paling in comparison to the already pretty corny disaster movie thrills of the original Twister — trading “From the director of Speed” for “From the director of Minari” doesn’t make your affair classier, it just makes it a marvel of boredom and wasted effort in search of actual escapism, probably like watching real storm chasers.

If you really were trying to correct certain things about the original, let’s play that game: sure swapping Twister’s crumbier cold open for an even more obvious investment in backstory makes sense, but the plot is utterly lost on Minari man Lee Isaac Chung, the removed antithesis to director Jan de Bont’s restless insistence. The first movie is all about them trying to get their little science balls into the deadly suck zone, in fact the ENTIRE MOVIE is just race to see who can get this dizzying data — it’s frustrating but you’re invested after all the spills and when they accomplish their macho meteorological maneuver it’s so rewarding, exciting, pent up and released like a theme park ride as DISASTER MOVIES GENERALLY SHOULD BE. In 2024 we would apparently rather drown in melodrama, the ‘dead friends’ kind rather than the ‘love triangle between my separated storm chaser wife and the therapist fiancé' routine. Believe me I can barely stomach when Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton are screaming about Daddy issues with a ‘nado just down the road, but that goop is still preferential.

It can’t go without saying the action is either unimpressive or nonexistent — only one of its four or so major sequences involves some technical interaction between the practical effects and digital enhancements, and regardless any of the film’s unfussy spectacle still kinda sucks. Again it’s living up to no masterpiece, I can’t even say I even like Twister but when they have to drive a truck through a house they drive a truck through a fucking house. Twisters is so slick and phony, despite real locations and shooting on Kodak film — de Bont’s film had stunning aerial photography this movie can’t even come close to with today’s drone technology, ha maybe you should’ve handed this over to someone who knows their way around both shlock and new tech like Michael Bay.

And although Twisters sidesteps any climate change rhetoric, the film still has to promulgate a message about evil lowballing profiteers pilfering storm-swept lands, something this shoddy script wants to play with morally but won’t commit to… Worse still, the reverence for nature is somehow diminished even when you account for how quiet Chung’s film is in contrast to 1996’s second biggest domestic feature (behind disaster maestro Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day). So what if Twisters features a scene at a rodeo, plays a couple country songs and refuses to let you forget we’re in the beautiful, scenic southern paradise of OOOOOOOOKlahoma where the cows go flying through the aaaiiiiiiirrrrrr. State pride aside Twisters has a smokescreen of authenticity, especially as it is carried by a crop of “rising stars.”

Apart from professional third wheel Anthony Ramos from In the Heights (no mackin’ for you this time), we have Daisy Edger-Jones from Where the Crawdads Sing (her unreadable demeanor is forced to conceal some already communicated trauma and guilt), and Glen Powell (whom you rightfully and wrongly expect to save the day and the movie), of Top Gun: Maverick and Hit Man, as the thrill junkie YouTube personality with a degree AND a heart of gold, too charming and romantic to make into the simple clone of Cary Elwes' original antagonist — Lordy the way this movie tries to eliminate the ‘good chasers vs. bad chasers’ angle isn’t mature or realistic, the tiresome ‘modern moral grey’ is just another of this movie’s forgettable, inferior alterations.  Even the 2nd act respite with our lead character’s accommodating Mom is worse — in ’96 Lois Smith offered superb presence and made you care about her character’s survival in a medical rescue moment. In the background no figures here have shit on the former, stupendous supporting ensemble spearheaded by Philip Seymour Hoffman and including Todd Field, Anthony Rapp, Alan Ruck, Jeremy Davies, Patrick Fischler, Sean Whalen and Joey Slotnick, just a king's ransom of "ah, that guy!"

I can’t believe Joseph Kosinski is responsible for the story (and just just the story as he’s probably too busy directing F1), since Top Gun: Maverick is precisely the textbook Twisters doesn’t follow, namely an emphasis on cinematic realism, warm, genuine emotions, plus Powell as part of a greater whole rather than the only grace note, all in all the legacyquel with dignity. Chung is candid and clever as director, producer, cinematographer and editor of the Rwandan journey of liberation disguised as revenge saga Munyurangabo — regardless this felt like the Universal equivalent of an indie-to-Marvel one-step yes-man process, since hardly any of his sensitivities bleed through even the quieter passages.

The disaster movie was my first love, yet it’s such a dilapidated, dogshit genre that, in hindsight, there are seldom few quality examples. Nostalgia carries The Day After Tomorrow far for me, War of the Worlds contains far too many other genres to include (but it’d be the GOAT far and away if you did), and similarly pandemic flicks (like Contagion or Outbreak) don’t quite qualify and maybe there’s more an argument to be made for harrowing historical features like Titanic or The Impossible or, ugh, The Perfect Storm, lame. As what one would call a desperate apologist for such saturated spectacle and waves of what-would-you-do-in-that-situation cinema, I’ll say the original Poseidon Adventure (and Wolfgang Petersen’s remake damn it!) represents what we crave, otherwise Deep Impact (gtfoh Armageddon) and Dante’s Peak (you can stay Volcano, whatever) are the only  really strong excerpts from the genre of suffering as showmanship. Recent attempts to reclaim mainstream attention for popcorn apocalypses like Pompeii, San Andreas and Geostorm certainly don’t speak to a bright future.

The fact that Twisters was maybe only a hair above the made-for-cheap found-footage-plus-tornado-twist Into the Storm is concerning, and frankly if I’m favoring The Core and 2012 above this new summer smash, something’s gone seriously wrong, not just with with critic’s giving this lousy, limp-wristed movie masquerading as a big budget blockbuster thanks to IP with nothing in common besides natural phenomena and a reference to their Dorothy machine. You can find more awe-inducing tornadoes in fucking The Wizard of Oz too.

It’s amazing that the mediocrity of 30 years ago outstrips the well-received slop of today. I thought this would be an overnight shoo-in for disaster movie all-timer rather than a dud you can barely call a distraction — if you’re going to replace sequences of man vs. nature with cheesy character development, just make sure such a exchange in entertainment value is actually worth it.