It’s no wonder that Lee Issac Chung’s Twisters shares a good amount of DNA with Jospeh Kosinski’s Top Gun: Maverick. Beyond the presence of Glen Powell (who takes a leading role here instead of simply playing the pseudo-Maverick foil to Miles Teller) and Kosinski himself (who has a “story by” credit as a result of his time spent in charge of the production before de-camping midway through to run Apple’s Formula One movie), it is a kind of legacyquel, in which a new generation of tech-and-chemistry savvy storm hunters try and tame Mother Nature’s most cinematic form of weather. That is, of course, the tornado, which once sucked up Dorothy Gale and her little dog too, but has become less of a focus, over time, in mainstream cinema, much like the disaster movie itself. There have been attempts at revivals, of course (Into the Storm, for one), and lots of city-centric disasters (San Andreas), but it isn’t unfair to note that Hollywood… doesn’t really give a shit about things that happen outside of the coasts. There’s a big gap in the American multiplex between Pittsburgh (or, at best, Chicago) and Las Vegas, though there are occasional flirtations with making Texas home to a summer blockbuster or two. This isn’t a crie-de-coeur plea to add a heap of Irvin Allen chaos to Little House on the Prairie, though I know Lionsgate is probably foaming at the mouth to do so, but it is a suggestion: there might be other interesting stories to tell outside of the major population centers, and that a general audience might turn out in droves to see it, much like they did with Maverick.
Chung was, at first blush, a strange choice to replace Jan de Bont in the director’s chair. His pedigree, at least up until 2023, was the arthouse. Few first-time filmmakers have their debuts selected for mainline competition at Cannes. Yet, he did, with his Rwanda-set feature Munyurangabo, which was also the first-ever film using the Kinyarwanda language to receive international acclaim and distribution. A wilderness period and his near retirement from cinema followed, but something in him changed. So, in 2020, he took Sundance by storm with Minari, a semi-autographical picture about a family of Korean immigrants making their way to Arkansas to start a farm. It’s strange to think of Minari as an audition piece for something like Twisters – mostly because it wasn’t, since its profoundly personal nature meant it was both without a shred of cynicism and an attempt to put an exclamation point on a career that he thought might be over – but it made a strong case that he was one of the few filmmakers who understood how to tell stories set within-or-adjacent to Tornado Alley without patronizing any given member of his audience. The action training came a bit later, once he’d rode Minari’s success to the Academy Awards and jobs with Lucasfilm on episodes of The Mandalorian. Still, his carefully and handsomely crafted realization of the oft forgotten and everyday beauty of the countryside set him up nicely for success here. It’s neither Hicksploitation nor a movie where city people and country people have to do Donnie-and-Marie-style duets about their skill sets.
It is, however, mostly just about some Oklahoma folk trying to help (or harm) their communities in the face of worsening storm systems and incredibly destructive weather. Hell, our only genuinely amoral outsider here will be our new Superman next year, David Corenswet, who is so far down the cast list you’d have to squint to see if he was in the movie. Our lead, Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones), is from the country – raised on a dairy farm by her mom (Maura Tierney), who had a life-long interest in bad weather, both in the wonder and terror that it inspired in her. “The worse the weather, the happier the girl,” Tierney says at one point, though it is somewhat of an unforced error that her introduction, shaded in similar lines to young Helen Hunt’s in de Bont’s original, sees her face a tragedy while she and a team of fellow college-aged storm chasers are conducting an experiment that requires them to get real close to what seems to be an F1 tornado – only to have it become an F5 on them right when they’re next to it. The cyclone kills every member of her team in that truck, including her boyfriend and Sally Draper, and she’s the lone survivor, aside from their data guy and point man, Javi (Anthony Ramos), who was logging information miles and miles away from a safe location. The reason it doesn’t work, in comparison to that sequence, is because there’s little child’s-eye wonder here – there’s a mixture of the sublime in that Spielbergian sequence in the original, as tragic as it is, and it’s also about the impression it leaves on Hunt’s character as a child more than the trauma watching her dad die gave her. Kate’s too old to be inspired by this point, and her fascination with the weather is made more of an expository note to be delivered later.
The first act struggles tonally because of this choice – we pick up years later, when she’s riding a desk at NOAA in NYC, thoroughly scarred from her experiences that day, at least until Javi reappears in her life. He’s started up a new data-gathering company out in Oklahoma, and he needs an expert storm chaser to complete his outfit. He wants her out in the field, and she almost immediately refuses. But the idea of potentially being able to help out in a more tactile way appeals somewhat to her, so she agrees to go with him out to a region in the state that’s seeing way more tornado activity than usual. When she gets there, she starts to sense that something is wrong – it’s far from the rag-tag and fun adventures that storm chasers usually have, given that there’s real money from “investors” in the enterprise, and that everyone on the team happens to look and be dressed like an Orkin exterminator, down to the polo shirts. That financing means things are a little safer, which is nice for someone so traumatized by what she lived through a few years back, but she remains ambiguous about how she feels about Javi’s “selling out.” What she knows she resents, however, are the YouTubers who seem, at first blush, to be profiteering off of human misery for views. She meets Charlie (Powell) and his band of misfits as they’re busy trying to track a storm – so that they can launch fireworks into it for views. His attitude seems to be one of wholesale cocky swagger, selling T-Shirts to fans and handing out signed 5x7s to whomever passes by. If this were The Bachelor, he’d be here for the wrong reasons. Or so she thinks.
Once Powell shows up with his crew, blaring country hits from their big-ass trucks as they do donuts in the dirt and silly shit to scare the bejesus out of a British journalist who’s been assigned to cover them, the movie slowly starts to come to life. Powell and Edgar-Jones come close to recreating the His Girl Friday aspirations of the first feature, with fun banter eventually giving way to a partnership and then a romance down the line, and Powell’s allowed to peel back his character’s layers enough for us to see that there’s a genuinely good person beneath the cocky exterior. His merch sales go to his team’s post-disaster relief out on the ground, with some of his team providing food and water for the now homeless while he and others help them find their missing pets and valuables. He’s a self-admitted adrenaline junkie who gave up roping steer at the Rodeo once he got knocked on the noggin a few too many times to try and lasso the truly impossible-to-catch (there’s a reason they’re called “storm chasers,” after all – you have no hope of really catching them). But his YouTuber antics are mainly to raise awareness – to get people to experience the majesty of this form of extreme weather, even as they learn how to be fully prepared for what might happen if a tornado were to touch down in their neighborhood. It’s really compelling, charismatic work from Powell, who is slowly becoming Tom Cruise’s true heir – in all the good ways, that is. Edgar-Jones does her best to keep up, but his dynamism means that he’s always out-maneuvering her. I’d compare him to Kathrine Hepburn, Irene Dunne or Rosalind Russell, but that’d neglect Cary Grant’s roles in those comedies, and there’s simply no equivalent levity, given that the story is about her getting her groove back, and not her being a stodgy goofball who’s forced to live a little.
Anyhow, it’s the back half of Twisters that really begins to fire on all cylinders. Of course, the action starts to get wilder, like when a tornado touches down at a rodeo that Kate and Tyler are attending, or the finale, in which a cyclone rips into a refinery and becomes the dreaded fire tornado, and Chung makes the most of his moment, capturing the awful beauty of these storms as they move across the landscape. They’re properly terrifying, rendered in vivid detail with deafening acoustics, and the action is always motivated by our characters trying to save lives – a nice note to hit even after the whole “Is it bad that we’re always destroying cities in superhero movie?” conversation after the genre’s critics were drowned in a giant pool of money. It’s a shockingly humanist take on the disaster movie, and even if it indulges in violent delights, it’s never too far away from reminding us of the violent ends, with each victim we see sucked up into the storm given enough shading to be sympathetic even if they’re not necessarily the best folks. This is why the third-act heroics, which delve into the realm of fantasy, work so well – they’re the power of filmmaking essentially saving a small town, with Chung making the metaphor literal by setting a large bit of the action inside the single-screen movie theater in the square, where people have gathered to try and avoid getting killed by the storm. Is it stupid? Sure, science bros will probably have shit to say about this the next time they get dragged on a podcast, but it’s wish-fulfillment storytelling intended to play well with people who regularly live through events just like this. The film’s politics, as well, are surprisingly broad – granola-crunching NPR listeners will enjoy that climate change is oft-cited, while Fox News diner-goers will appreciate the film’s perspective on homegrown disaster capitalism in the form of Javi’s financiers (think ProPublica’s stories about We Buy Ugly Houses’ alleged actions). But importantly – it’s just a good fucking time. That’s it.
In short, what I’m trying to say is that Chung takes a big-tent approach to American entertainment, much like Maverick did back in 2022, and you get the feeling that this is stateside content with worldwide appeal, to use the industry lingo. I don’t mean this in a xenophobic way, or that it should necessarily be a model for every single thing that comes out of Hollywood – what it is happens to be something that American audiences will enjoy for region-specific reasons, while everyone else will enjoy the Americana and precipitous amounts of entertainment on screen. Though we’re no longer in the days in which Hollywood would send second-unit teams out to other countries to film region-specific bits to court censors like, say, what Marvel did with Iron Man 3 in China, American blockbusters are often exports, and it’s no surprise imports are doing so well here, to the astonishment of executives who thought people wouldn’t watch Squid Game if it had subtitles.
This used to be our model, after all – we’d make cinema for domestic audiences, often set in places that wouldn’t be immediately recognizable tourist spots (if Jaws were made today, it’d be set on Rockaway Beach), but would represent segments of a national audience willing to go to other parts of their country. And because they were good movies, they’d attract international attention. Of course, the budgets got so big that the studios had to depend on a foreign gross in order to have a chance at making their shareholders happy, but the point still stands. Make this movie totally separate from its IP (as far as I’m aware, no one has copyrighted the tornado), and it’d still have a shot at success worldwide, despite not being a globe-trotting adventure in the vein of the modern blockbuster. Twisters’ opening weekend gross might remind studios of the wisdom that one of the heartland’s best populist poets offered 30-odd years ago: If you build it (here), worldwide audiences will come. Kosinski did it with Maverick, Chung did it with this, and they can do it too.