Can Glen Powell’s Charm Make ‘Twisters’ a Whirlwind Success?
Twisters promises CGI tornado action but is the charm of Glen Powell enough to make this a fun summer blockbuster or does the shallow characterization take the wind out of the movie’s sails?
Legend has it that when James Cameron was pitching Aliens, he wrote down the word “Alien”, popped an S on the end of the word, and turned the S into a dollar sign.
Commercial motivation feels like the central idea behind so many of the legacy sequels we see these days. Take a successful property from decades past, throw some plucky new characters in there, pump it up with marketing that taps into our collective nostalgia, and you have yourself a box office hit.
Twisters certainly doesn’t stray far from this mentality.
The original 1996 film starring Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton was a box office success and it’s beloved by a sect of people, but it’s not a gigantic ‘90s disaster classic like Independence Day or Armageddon. It doesn’t quite have the scale to match those two films—the tornadoes pose a threat to small towns in rural Oklahoma, not the entire planet.
But that film gave us a decent enough balance of story and CGI tornado action to be a fun summer flick.
The 2024 follow-up Twisters ups the stakes a bit with a plot about destroying tornadoes and attempts to flesh out our storm chasers with a few more character moments. But does it pull off those objectives while still delivering on the fun?
Our leads here are Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and Tyler (2024’s “it” boy Glen Powell) who begin on opposing teams.
She’s like a combination of Jo and Bill from the original film in that she’s got a tragic backstory and an instinctual knowledge of storms that just can’t be explained with science. He’s a flashy YouTuber with a ragtag gang of “tornado wranglers” who seems more interested in the thrill of the chase than the potentially life-saving applications of the scientific data.
The new-ish element of this story is Anthony Ramos as Javi. He’s a former chaser who was on Kate’s team and has now moved on to work for a military-funded project trying to map a tornado with radar. He’s got the money, he’s got the technology, and he’s got a squad of highly-educated dudes including David Corenswet to execute these missions. Think Cary Elwes’s character Jonas from the 1996 film.
So now we have this little triangle and we have a record number of tornadoes—though we never hear climate change mentioned as a cause because apparently films should not have a message.
And fair enough. If you’re making a summer blockbuster with absolutely nothing to say, you can just focus on the fun…right?
Sort of.
One of the biggest strengths of Godzilla Minus One was that we cared about the characters. It’s a movie where a big giant monster stomps a city, but we didn’t just cheer for crumbling buildings. We wanted the heroes to win because we were invested in the characters.
That’s not exactly the case here.
Despite having up-and-coming actors like Edgar-Jones, Powell, Corenswet, Ramos, Katy O’Brian, Brandon Perea, and Sasha Lane in the cast from the main roles to the members of the storm-chasing gang, none of these characters feel particularly three-dimensional. Hell, some don’t even feel two-dimensional!
Half the time, they’re spouting ultra-cliche lines that feel like an AI could have written them and no one ever moves out of generic territory. The film relies so much on the charm of Powell that the Tyler on the page is merely a loose collection of standard character traits under a tipped cowboy hat and some sunglasses. I get that Powell is the next big thing, but this guy just did not appeal to me at all, and his being appealing is the whole movie.
Thankfully, we have CGI tornadoes.
I remember my teenage mind being blown by the impressive CGI in 1996 and the action scenes here are still fun despite audiences being generally desensitized to CGI spectacle these days.
A scene of Tyler shooting fireworks into a tornado feels like the kind of dumb popcorn fun we used to get from these types of films back in the ‘90s. Another with the tornado striking a movie theater feels like a nice little nod to the drive-in scene in the original film.
With the advancements in CGI and the decrease in the desire for appealing characters in a blockbuster, I wished we could have just gone balls-to-the-wall with tornado scenes instead of spending more time with these people.
So, while it’s not like the 1996 Jan de Bont film was a masterpiece, Lee Isaac Chung’s legacy sequel feels more like the corporate product Jonas would be into than something Bill and Jo would get behind.
