Twisters: Getting Past the Past

Daisy Edgar-Jones stars as Kate Cooper, a former storm chaser haunted by a devastating encounter with a tornado during her college years who now studies storm patterns on screens safely in New York City. She is lured back to the open plains by her friend, Javi (Golden Globe nominee Anthony Ramos, In the Heights) to test a groundbreaking new tracking system. There, she crosses paths with Tyler Owens (Glen Powell), the charming and reckless social-media superstar who thrives on posting his storm-chasing adventures with his raucous crew, the more dangerous the better. As storm season intensifies, terrifying phenomena never seen before are unleashed, and Kate, Tyler and their competing teams find themselves squarely in the paths of multiple storm systems converging over central Oklahoma in the fight of their lives.

REVIEW:

In Twisters the tornadoes are not monsters with malevolent intent, they are just weather events. They sprawl destroying nature and towns. That makes it a perfect choice for stories of devastation, consequences and very human drama. Losing and finding your humanity— your heart, soul and mind are the film’s focus. The tornadoes are the deus ex machina that comes and go. They are more of a symbol of global warming that tend to spawn echoes.

With two exceptions, the tornadoes shown, reflect the standard Weather Channel depiction of them. They are a reality that is thouroughly familiar. The focus is more on the human destruction they cause. This is about town being destroyed, people losing their homes, lives, livelihoods due to a highly relentless fickle finger of fate. It’s also about the people, whole industries that take advantage of it to make a profit, disguising their greed as charity and concern.

Kate Carter (Daisy Edgar-Jones) lives with the PTSD of a past tornado trauma. It has left her a storm whisperer. She has a kindred sense of how cyclones behave, where they will move, what makes them strengthen and weaken. She has the respect, fear and anxiety of a survivor. She also knows when and how she can fight them. The plot gives her the opportunity to do that up close. She becomes a part of a group of highly corporate sponsored storm trackers headed by a former college friend, Javi (Anthony Ramos).

Against this the team must fight and collaborate with a social media circus of celebrities, influencers and bloggers and podcasters, The cockiest and worst of them is Tyler Owens (Glen Powell). He travels with a ragtag band of chasers who fly drones and shoot fireworks into the tornadoes, the better to get the shot for YouTube. Tyler calls himself the “tornado wrangler,” sells branded T-shirts and styles himself as a cowboy. Kate hates him on sight.

Twisters evolves in an action, adventure film about ordinary people trying to accomplish extraordinary things that can save countless lives. The director Lee Isaac Chung brings his own experiences and knowledge of growing up in the American Midwest and living through its terrible storm cycles.

Glenn Powell as Tyler Owens is Twister’s unquestioned star. He’s seems to be having a blast playing the modern day cowboy crossed with a romantic hero. He starts off as a jerk but slowly evolves into a person with a heart of gold.

Next to him, Edgar-Jones seems ordinary, lackluster.

Their chemistry is barely there. I saw them as admiring colleagues developing a good working relationship. Romance for them is a stretch. Since it’s expected, the director delivers it. Powell pulls it off, filling in her vacuum with his total charisma. He makes it impossible not to fall in love with him.

The mismatch hampers Twisters and lags it a little bit. I kept on wishing they had cast someone with spark instead of spunk, someone who can bounce of Powell’s charm more fruitfully. Fortunately there is enough funny and danger set pieces to make up for it.

The story is about fighting and overcoming personal monsters anyway. The goal isn’t just to predict the path the tornadoes will take — science has mostly figured that one out. Instead, the aim is to fight them, deflate them, defang them. The futility of such a quest is what’s in question. It’s all indirectly about whether climate change can be reversed. .