[COLUMN] Twisters is a True Spiritual Successor to a '90s Blockbuster | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains spoilers for the movie Twisters, as much as a movie about tornadoes can be spoiled. If you are worried about that, you can bookmark this and check it out later.

Lee Isaac Chung’s Twisters is a refreshingly modest legacyquel.

Twisters is a follow-up to Jan de Bont’s Twister, the second highest-grossing movie of 1996. Although the film’s legacy has grown in recent years, in large part in recognition of de Bont’s blockbuster craft in an era increasingly bereft of such style, Twister wasn’t especially well-received by contemporary critics. “You want loud, dumb, skilful, escapist entertainment?” Roger Ebert asked in his review. “Twister works. You want to think? Think twice about seeing it.”

Of course, Twister doesn’t necessarily lend itself to the modern franchise model. Two of its key performers passed away at tragically young ages: Bill Paxton and Philip Seymour Hoffman. The second lead, Helen Hunt, had proposed her own follow-up to Twister alongside her Blindspotting co-stars Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal, acknowledging that her pitch for a minority-led sequel was largely ignored. “[W]e couldn’t get a meeting,” she admits. “It was sobering.”

As such, Twisters doesn’t have the luxury of that sort of nostalgic pandering. There was never any possibility of a scene in which Jo Harding (Hunt) hands down a dusty old weather monitoring system known as “Dorothy” to a plucky young Kate Cooper (Daisy Edgar-Jones) in a scene clearly shot on greenscreen or in which a computer-generated Bill Harding (Paxton) profoundly advises young “tornado wrangler” Tyler Owens (Glen Powell) “if you feel it… chase it” as an orchestral version of Van Halen’s Human Beings rises in the background.

Twisters never treats the original Twister with the sort of performative reverence that has derailed so many previously fun franchises like the Ghostbusters films, steering those series sharply into shallow and self-serious fanservice. Director Lee Isaac Chung and writers Mark L. Smith and Joseph Kosinski understand that the best way that Twisters could pay homage to the original Twister is to be a big, dumb, fun and ultimately well-made crowd-pleasing blockbuster. The film accomplishes this.

Much has been made of Tom Cruise’s mentorship of Glen Powell, including teaching the young star how to hold popcorn while posing for a promotional image. It’s hard not to imagine Cruise beaming with pride at the climax of Twisters, as the characters look for a building to provide shelter in a storm. “We have to get everybody into the movie theatre!” screams Javi (Anthony Ramos). As the tornado bears down on them, he gasps, “This theatre wasn’t built to withstand what’s coming!”

In a world where the scale of blockbuster cinema has inflated to the point of absurdity, there’s something quite endearing in the way that Twisters is content to simply blow the roof off a movie theatre in a clear statement of intent. There is an endearing lack of winking irony or self-awareness in Twisters, a movie where Javi’s business partner Scott (David Corenswet) reveals himself to be a bad dude by curtly responding to Javi’s appeals to think of civilians with, “I don’t care about the people!”

Indeed, the most remarkable thing about Twisters is that it actually feels like a 1990s blockbuster. It captures a lot of the tone and the mood of the original film, something that legacyquels often lose in the transition to a more modern sensibility. Twisters is clearly the work of a production team that grew up watching the four-quadrant hits of the 1990s, and have a lot of appreciation for what made those films stand apart from the blockbusters before and after.

The original Twister was part of a wave of natural disaster movies during the 1990s. An artifact of the old studio system that died out during the 1970s, the genre experienced a mild revival on the cusp of the millennium. Twister is of a piece with movies like Volcano, Dante’s Peak, Deep Impact, Armageddon and even Titanic. These are all stories about how, for all its great accomplishments, humankind is ultimately subject to the chaotic whims of an arbitrary universe.

As with the decade’s boom in serial killer film and television that experienced a nostalgic revival with Longlegs last weekend, it’s possible to understand this interest in natural disasters as a reflection of a peculiarly millennial anxiety. The Cold War was over. Liberal democracy had triumphed. From an American perspective, it was “the unipolar moment.” There was no viable external enemy. It was a time of relative prosperity and peace. The only thing to fear was seemingly random acts of violence.

Just as many of the decade’s big serial killer films (like se7en or Fallen) were permeated by religious anxieties, there was a spiritual subtext underpinning these movies about natural disasters. After all, these sorts of events are often perceived as “acts of God.” In these movies, while there are human antagonists like yuppie storm chaser Jonas Miller (Cary Elwes) who is “in it for the money, not the science”, the real fear is some force far more powerful and unknowable than any human person.

Twisters understands this. It is, in many ways, a movie about faith. Kate is the best storm chaser in the business, but Chung shoots her moments of divination as almost religious rites. She acts as much on impulse as logic. Tyler explains to Ben (Harry Hadden-Paton), the British journalist profiling him, that understanding tornadoes is “part-science, part-religion.” Characters pray as tornados pass over them. The climax of the film finds Kate taking her hands off the steering wheel, trusting fate.

This isn’t how most modern blockbusters work. The conspiracy thriller has become the default mode of modern popcorn entertainment, as evidenced most recently by Fly Me to the Moon. Most big budget summer fare tends to build towards a reveal that there is some villain’s hand guiding all the horror, some “author of all [the lead character’s] pain.” In many cases, it’s often an ostensibly trustworthy character, as it was this year in The Fall Guy, Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F or Bad Boys: Ride or Die.

Twisters feels surprisingly authentic, even beyond its understanding of the narrative logic of the film that it seeks to sequelize. The movie has a real sense of place, particularly when contrasted to so many depictions of “the Heartland” in popular film and television. Chung grew up in Arkansas, and his understanding of rural America shines through. While movies like Ghostbusters: Afterlife have to manufacture an imagined rural America in Alberta, Canada, Twisters shot on location in Oklahoma. Interestingly, Tyler is from Arkansas.

That said, there is an inherent tension within Twisters between the classic blockbusters that it evokes and the more modern expectations of a film like this. As weird as it is to type this sentence, Twisters is very transparently a post-9/11 and a post-Great-Recession sequel to Twister. This is most obvious at the edge of the frame, rather than at the heart of the story. There’s a subtle – but very clear – shift in tone between the two films.

The original Twister opened with a flashback to Jo Harding’s childhood, in which her father (Richard Lineback) was swept away by a tornado. This obviously provides a Freudian motivation for Jo’s later career chasing extreme weather, but Jo never seems especially traumatized by the events. Indeed, Jo continues working in the field even after her husband Bill packs up to become a television weatherman to escape the constant threat of death.

Twisters begins with a similar set piece, in which Kate and Javi lose the rest of their team (Daryl McCormack, Kiernan Shipka and Nik Dodani) to a tornado. However, Kate is much more recognizably traumatized by these events. She leaves storm-chasing to accept a safer desk job in New York. When she is drawn back into the field, she has a panic attack that leads her to retreat from the first twister that the team encounters. Kate’s trauma is much more central to her character.

There is also a strangely militaristic tone. After the loss of the team, Javi enlists. He secures advanced military technology to help model storms. While the scientists in the original Twister chased knowledge for its own sake, Javi and Kate’s motivations are much more aggressive. Javi talks about trying to “fight back” against the tornadoes that took the people that they loved. Kate tries to develop a weapon to “tame” tornadoes, while Tyler boasts that he can “wrangle” them. In fact, Tyler is obsessed with firing missiles into tornadoes. (His big contribution to the final plan is that he “can shoot rockets at it.”) It is a little strange.

To be fair, some of these shifts make sense. Twisters is much more concerned with the human cost of these extreme weather events than the original was. Twister was a product of “the end of history”, and it didn’t seem to question its characters’ obsession with chasing death. If anything, Twister suggested that these characters’ self-destructive impulses were an expression of a millennial existential ennui, a desire to feel something – anything – in “the Era of Interregnum.”

In contrast, Twisters exists in the wake of the War on Terror and natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina. It is hard to be so cavalier about the devastation wrought by these weather systems. Twisters also has a deeper understanding of the systems at play even beyond the weather. The movie reflects a post-Great-Recession understanding of predatory disaster capitalism. Javi and Scott are funded by industrialist Marshall Riggs (David Born), who swoops in after disasters to buy land at low prices.

Twisters can’t necessarily support all of this. The film is caught in something of a crosswind between the innocence of big dumb classic blockbusters and a slightly more modern sensibility. It’s to the credit of the creative team that it balances these contradictory and competing impulses as well as it does. However it might struggle to reconcile two very different approaches to making this sort of crowd-pleasing spectacle, the result is a rare legacyquel that feels true to its source material.