Twisters (2024)

**/****
starring Daisy Edgar-Jones, Glen Powell, Anthony Ramos, Kiernan Shipka
screenplay by Mark L. Smith
directed by Lee Isaac Chung

by Walter Chaw Lee Isaac Chung’s Twisters is the whistle next to the graveyard, a fascinating companion piece to Adam Wingard’s Godzilla x Kong: the one a spectacle designed to desensitize against our ongoing climate collapse, the other to deaden us against widely-broadcast images of an ongoing genocide. Its only two points of interest are Glen Powell’s sudden ascendance as matinee idol and the astounding majesty of natural phenomena fuelled by man-made climate change–meaning, in its simplicity, the goal is to leave audiences with the dazed satiation one associates with the aftermath of an ostentatious fireworks display: half-deafened, eyes bedazzled, the smell of gunpowder sulphurous in the air. A gut full of barbecued meats and sugared drinks in the American fashion, celebrating our liberation from a monarchy on the back of our God-sanctioned manifest genocide of an Indigenous population. We had fun, but that hangover is a sonofabitch. For me, the best part of Twisters is the extended prologue, where I thought it was going to be a Kiernan Shipka movie.

Alas, this is a Daisy Edgar-Jones and Glen Powell movie (Shipka’s character is immediately shipped off to Oz). Traumatized tornado hunter Kate (Edgar-Jones), who has a preternatural ability to deduce the otherwise random paths of tornados (a skill we know is being used because the soundtrack for Field of Dreams rises up for some reason whenever Kate gets starry-eyed), is lured back into the game, Ripley-in-Aliens-style, after her first big run-in with a monster twister results in the deaths of everyone except her and buddy Javi (Anthony Ramos). Javi, who goes to work for a well-funded tornado-hunting agency, wants Kate to help them ascertain the paths of twisters so they can study them from the inside. Meanwhile, social-media sensation Tyler Owens (Powell) arrives on the scene with his million-megawatt grin, a spotless white Stetson, and enough sultry, blue-steel musk to impregnate every woman of breeding age in the auditorium. Kate and Tyler’s meet-cute sets up a sequence where Kate demonstrates her tornado-whispering superpower while egghead Ben (Harry Hadden-Paton), the thankless narrative foil, marvels, “She’s going the wrong way!” “Nope,” says Tyler, his smirk burning like the noonday sun. Tyler may not know twisters like Kate, but you best believe he knows the ladies, nature’s other deadly tempest, amiright?

Ben represents castrated intellectualism, ineffective in both the Alpha of Tyler’s twisto-inferno and the Omega of Kate’s touch-feely oneness with nature. I’ll be honest, I’m a little grateful/surprised–and also not surprised–that an Indigenous actor wasn’t cast as Kate. Ben’s role is essentially that of the author/journalist archetype from westerns who appears in the company of outlaws to chronicle their larger-than-life deeds and who, by the end, learns the zero-sum game of masculinity that elevates dangerous legend over mendacious truths. “You know, our crew is not like your crew, Kate,” Tyler aw-shucks at her, “we don’t need PhDs or fancy gadgets to do what we do. I can guarantee you these guys have seen more tornados than anybody else in this lot combined.” It’s funny because Tyler’s tricked-out rig is loaded with fancy gadgets, including two giant screws that anchor it to the ground so tornados can wash over them while they hoot like a crate of smuggled gibbons, which makes me wonder what it is Tyler is boasting about not having. It isn’t gadgets that men object to, after all–men love gadgets. So what is it? Maybe what he’s saying is that he jury-rigs his own gadgets and doesn’t depend on fancy-schmancy engineers and British-accented twerps like Ben for his technology. It’s a thought punctuated by the very next scene, in which Tyler’s team watches dailies from the day’s shoot to laugh at Ben’s unfortunate panic. Now it’s time for another tornado sequence.

There’s more. How can there be more? I don’t know, but there is. You have every right to ask. Kate has a theory that if you were to load up a tornado with the right chemical at the right time, you could dissipate it before it causes massive damage to human settlements. All her attempts thus far have led to the Oz-ification of her friends, so she’s reluctant to give it another go–UNTIL, that is, she finds out… Jesus, are you bored yet? Let me say, though, that the tornado effects are magnificent, awe-inspiring. Think back to your first IMAX science documentary screening at your local Natural History museum. About midway through the film, a dual tornado appears, then branches off into sister twisters. Ignore the bullshit the people are hooting about and take in the Sam Neill-sees-Brontosauruses grandeur of what a modern mainframe can paint into existence. I confess it took my breath away. A wildfire a couple of years ago decimated the neighbourhood just north of mine in Colorado, resulting in an evacuation during the heart of the pandemic. We never thought it would happen where we are because it never had before–but a once-in-a-century windstorm combined with unusually hot temperatures and drought led to a wall of flame shooting through heavily-developed areas in a Denver suburb. What did I feel when ash fell on our windshield as we raced to save a friend and her pets? It felt like exactly what we bought and voted for.

Twisters is instantly forgettable pop pabulum that makes a gendered morality statement about the palpable evidence of the end of habitable life on this planet. It’s like those bland, expressionless illustrations of people in the middle of an airplane crash on the emergency cards tucked into seatback pouches. Turns out Javi’s company is “ambulance chasing” these storms to get first dibs on the property desperate people who’ve just had their homes steamrolled might now want to sell at a discount. And it turns out Tyler’s social-media clout is being spent on providing potato chips and blankets to those same demolished communities. What are we talking about now? Real estate developers have been the bad guys in movies–and life–since Lex Luthor, but since when are TikTok Influencers the last hope for civilization? Fuck, I’m so old maybe they are; nobody else is stepping up. The supporting cast for Chung’s follow-up to his dulcet, lovely Minari is calculatedly multi-culti, but it resolves as two beautiful cis-het white people finding a love connection at the end of the world. “You don’t face your fears,” Tyler says thoughtfully at a rodeo right before God gives his opinion on lines like this. “You ride ’em.” I have concerns about riding my fears, given that I’m mainly afraid of sharks, but country aphorisms can be tough for me sometimes. I did like the part where a movie theatre is torn apart, suggesting there is literally no place to escape or feel safe when the planet gets sick of our shit.

Twisters is a neo-Irwin Allen tokusatsu extravaganza that purports to be a lot of fun but is more a dead-on reflection of the collective fears of the current moment. Late in the film, as a group of survivors, including Kate and Tyler, take refuge in an empty swimming pool, you’ll note that it’s a redux of the opening sequence showing Kate, again, being the little spoon to a man sheltering her from certain death. What if, instead, Kate insisted on covering Tyler because of her grief over the past and, in the process, dialled down Tyler’s testosterone a couple of notches? Maybe the question is the answer. Without depth, even when the opportunity for it presents itself, Twisters relies on misery-porn and witty-romantic ripostes, scored at high decibels by new country-music bangers and chantillied by a cameo from Maura Tierney, made up to look distractingly like Pixies bassist Kim Deal for reasons I cannot begin to unpack. Is it good? That’s the wrong question. More useful to wonder whether it has adequately prepared us to accept that the rest of our lives will play out against the backdrop of mass death events that, if they were presentable once, no longer appear to be preventable. Just relax, put on your oxygen mask before you help someone else with theirs, put your head between your knees, and pucker up, Buttercup.