I wish I understood the hold, bland white women had on studio heads. Granted, this is hardly a new phenomenon. But I can’t help but feel that the town is trying to make “fetch” happen only with Daisy Edgar-Jones.
That Twisters is as fun as it is, despite Edgar-Jones doing her level best to out-suck a tornado, is a testament to Lee Isaac Chung. Chung has graduated to the big time, as it were, with this being his first blockbuster, and I’m over the moon to report that he’s got the stuff. He brings the intimacy of his early independent work such as Minari, and brought it to bear to set us right down amidst the action.
However, Mark L. Smith’s script makes the all-too-common mistake of making things more complicated than they need to be. To be fair to Smith and Chung, this stems from their attempts to re-work the original Twister into a modern-day blockbuster. Much like with the year’s earlier Road House, they attempt to remake the original by using the same blueprint but making some key changes in the design.
Jan de Bont’s original Twister has seen its legacy morph from a cheesy blockbuster to the model representation of the kind of blockbuster Hollywood’s forgotten how to make. With its sitcom-esque will they/won’t they smuggled into the middle of a series of tornadoes framed like the shark from Jaws with a murderer’s row of character actors each adding their bit to the larger whole, Twister feels BIG. Not surprising since de Bont was hot off directing Speed and the script was written by Micahel Crichton and Anna Marie-Martin.
However, Smith’s script gets too lost in making Kate (Edgar-Jones) a tragic figure. Helen Hunt’s Jo was haunted in the original by the loss of her father. Kate is haunted by how she blames herself for the death of all her friends during a science experiment gone wrong. The experiment? She believed she had created a chemical mix she had hoped would cause a tornado to dissipate.
Herein lies the biggest problem of Twisters. The tornadoes as trauma isn’t a bad idea, Crichton and Martin play it pretty straightforward. But Smith turns it into what I can only describe as a literal metaphor, and instead of coping with them and learning about them, it transforms Twisters into a story about Kate trying to kill tornadoes. This makes the final action set piece feel oddly anti-climatic because instead of merely trying to survive the F-5 it becomes Kate vs the F-5.
As a bit of fiction, science-fiction even, in a world increasingly aware of climate change and its effects, it’s a nifty little idea. But they don’t do anything with it. Climate change is somehow barely even mentioned. Instead, it’s all tied to Kate’s trauma and getting her to move on.
Still, despite that, Twisters is helluva a lot of fun. Mainly due to Glen Powell as the Youtuber Tyler Owens. A good ol’ boy with charm and sex appeal to fuel an entire franchise. Powell almost rips the film out of Edgar-Jones’s limp hands. Honestly, hearing that Powell would be playing a tornado rustler is an idea so infinitely cool that I’m left confused as to why they felt they needed all this other melodrama. Yet, Powell’s performance isn’t an intentional scene-stealer. It’s a generous turn with Powell trying his best to make the film a co-starring venture but Edgar-Jones is so uninteresting that if it weren’t for him Twisters wouldn’t work.
He’s not alone, Anthony Ramos plays Javi, the only one of Kate’s friends who survived the tragic incident. He harbors some feelings for Kate, creating a kind of fun house mirror version of the previous film’s love triangle. Both men are so disarmingly charismatic that the fact they both have the hots for Kate borders on baffling.
Why? There’s nothing there. Smith’s script gives Edgar-Jones all the backstory a competent actor would need, but she does nothing with it. The film briefly teases us with Kiernan Shipka in the beginning. Her role is small but immediately there’s a sense of a character we would like to spend more time with. Of course, she has to die or else it would be yet another person more interesting than Kate.
Maybe it’s why Twisters does so little with Tyler’s team. Smith’s script attempts something interesting which is to blur the lines in our allegiance by making Tyler’s team, salt of the earth types, seem like adrenaline chasers, and Javi’s team of data-driven scientists as the good guys. But again Smith overcomplicates things when a subplot is revealed that Javi’s team is funded by a land developer who uses the data to swoop in and buy land dirt cheap from recently devastated working-class families. But wouldn’t you know it Tyler and his crew, actually care about the victims and while they may be reckless, help out after the tornado has left.
But the problem is that it overstuffs the roster of characters. Meaning Chung and his cameraman Dan Mindel aren’t able to give the cast of character actors a chance to shine. Not to mention that the only team that seems all that stacked with recognizable faces is Tyler’s. The underlying problem is that Chung and Mindel’s camera keeps drifting over to Powell and his team, while Smith’s script keeps stubbornly trying to make us care about Kate.
Tyler’s team has Brandon Pera as Boone, Tyler’s sidekick and videographer, Sasha Alexander as Lily the drone operator, and Tunde Adebimpe as the scientist. The crew is a diverse lot with a swirl of backgrounds. But yet despite the talent on display Lung and Mindel never give them much of a chance to shine. They’re meant to be characters with a capital ‘C’ but they get lost amid all the tornadoes, nearly obliterated by the dramatic inertia dealing with Kate’s trauma.
No joke, around about the last half of the movie the film stops dead so Edgar-Jones’ traumatised Kate can go home and work some stuff out. For almost thirty minutes, Twisters stops dead to deal with issues a better script would have dealt with while on the run. Insult to injury it’s revealed that Kate’s mother Cathy is played by none other than Maura Tierney. Tierney I believe has at least stepped foot in Oklahoma. Asking me to believe that Edgar-Jones is both her daughter AND Oaklhoman is a bridge too far. Understand, even though they shot on location in Oklahoma which means I have documented proof that she’s actually been there… I STILL don’t believe it.
I can hear you asking, if Edgar-Jones is so bland, how is Twisters so much fun? Because Chung and Mindel along with Terilyn A. Shropshire in the editing room, cobble together something short of a miracle. Despite the black hole in the center of it all, there is a compelling and rip-roaring good time going on around the edges. Chung uses his indie roots to make the tornado scenes feel claustrophobic, trading the grandiose and swooping cameras, for the tense, and intimate, making us feel the threat of mother nature. The tornadoes loom over the film with a psychological weight, just as in de Bont’s Twister.
Granted they try to do a few scenes that reference the original that don’t quite pay off. The final set piece takes place in a movie theater, an homage to one of the best scenes in the original that takes place in a drive-in. However, as nail-biting as the scene is, it lacks a certain poetic uneasiness.
Yet, there’s a scene that involves a twister hitting an oil field that is as good as anything from the first movie. A well and true spectacle that shows how Chung can use editing and camera placement to make us feel the action in our bones. It’s a wonderful bit of destructive-sploitation that tickled me to my very core.
Twisters is a mixed bag, to say the least. But despite the glaring flaws of the script and one of its leads, it’s still got plenty of bang for your buck. Even if it does somehow fumble the enemies to lovers aspect and not have them kiss. Perhaps this is because coming up with a tornado-destroying chemical is more believable.
Images courtesy of Universal Pictures
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