When Twister became a smash hit at the outset of summer 1996, it kicked off a season of glorious disasters. Twister tore up the Midwest; Independence Day blew up the east coast (and the rest of the world, but it was those images of DC and New York landmarks that really lingered); The Rock threatened San Francisco with a chemical attack (and some very reckless driving); and Fled, The Frighteners, Multiplicity, and Kazaam all left a smoking crater nationwide when they bombed on the same weekend. (A different form of disaster, granted, but still.) In 2024, Twisters is a big-budget disaster-movie sequel coming out in mid-July that somehow feels like a form of counterprogramming—to what else is playing at the multiplex, anyway. Depending on where and when you see it, the movie could also come across as scarily in sync with your surroundings. 18 hours after I saw it, my phone buzzed with an emphatic tornado warning. My family made mordant jokes about viral marketing. Then four such storms touched down in the geographical region I was visiting—western New York state, not exactly known as Tornado Alley.
Is the real world too stormy to enjoy escapism in the form of Twisters? Obviously real tornados existed in 1996, too; they lent an otherwise pretty silly movie some gravity, the sense that then-new-ish CG tech was being used to supersize nature into spectacle worthy of a stunt show. In the decades since, we’ve gotten used to seeing similarly apocalyptic images come to life on the news or the actual world—whether through the man-made devastation of 9/11 or the different-man-made devastation of the environment, disguised as something more natural but no less frightening.
Twisters, directed by Minari’s Lee Isaac Chung, offers a fantasy of prevention, with a safe side dish of righteousness over the potential exploitation of families who lose everything in natural disasters. Kate Cooper (Daisy Edgar-Jones) has big dreams of neutralizing storms by allowing just the right substance to get sucked up into a tornado and sapping its moisture. This gives her fresh-faced team a logistical challenge not unlike the launch of Dorothy, the data-collection tool from Twister, only this time with bigger results, dammit. Unfortunately, Kate suffers a terrible loss in the opening sequence, and she takes her preternatural storm-watching prowess to a New York City weather-service desk job. Years later, her former colleague Javi (Anthony Ramos) lures her back into the field, which is how she meets showboating storm-chasing YouTuber Tyler Owens (Glen Powell).
It’s supposed to be a variation on the original movie’s lovably cornball dynamic, where scrappy scientists Helen Hunt, Bill Paxton, and pals were pitted against corporate, soulless competition; here, the earnest and idealistic scientist has corporate backing, while the scrappy folks appear more opportunistic. Yet despite some narrative switches and less ensemble hijinks, the movie’s attempts to separate the two teams are muddled, and often seem to be based on the characters’ own false assumptions; it takes forever for Tyler to catch up with the audience’s knowledge that “city girl” Kate is actually an Oklahoma native, and the movie doesn’t seem to understand or care that both teams use plenty of tech (or that the custom drills outfitted underneath his manly truck, designed to root it to the ground mid-storm, are also, in fact, pretty advanced technology). The movie doesn’t seem to have any particular feelings about Tyler’s sharable daredevilry or, especially, Kate’s desire to “disrupt” weather without ever speaking to the root causes of more frequent extreme weather events. Just so long as their hearts are in the right place, y’all.
