“Twisters” gives fans what they want, for better or worse

It’s the stuff of movie-nerd legend. In his pitch to studio executives for a sequel to Ridley Scott’s 1979 hit “Alien”, director James Cameron approached a whiteboard and simply appended the original film's title with a dollar-sign: “Alien$”. Where Cameron was equating more buggy baddies with more box office, the new, pluralized “Twister” sequel, “Twisters”, simply gives more of the same. Here, there’s at least 30 years’ worth of technological advancement, and perhaps accordingly, 30 years’ worth of Hollywood tentpole stagnation.

In it, Kate Carter (Daisy Edgar-Jones of Hulu’s “Normal People”) is a preternaturally talented meteorological student shown in the film’s prologue leading an experiment to attempt to dissipate already formed tornadoes in her stomping grounds of rural Oklahoma. A misjudgment results in tragedy as an EF-5 tornado fatally rips away most of her cohorts.

Five years later, she works a desk job for the National Weather Service in New York City and still blames herself for their deaths. The only other survivor of the deadly twister, Javi (Anthony Ramos of Broadway’s “Hamilton"), lures her back into storm-tracking with some new-fangled imaging devices around which he’s engineered a tech/real estate start-up.

“Twisters" really only touches down once Kate makes her way back home to discover storm-chasing culture has taken on a life of its own, due to local YouTube star Tyler Owens (“Hitman” and “Top Gun: Maverick" star Glen Powell). Kate and Tyler initially clash but predictably with welcome sparks of flirtation, largely owed to nascent major star Powell’s innate charisma. His Tyler is loose cannon–shooting fireworks up into an active funnel for the views–whose chiseled visage is caricatured on the T-shirt his motley crew of weather-heads sell roadside. What follows is a test of morals and ethics when, just like in the first film, a David and Goliath story of upstarts versus corporations has Katie questioning her allegiances.

The original “Twister" is emblematic of its 1996 release year-–the same that saw the release of “Independence Day”--and big-budget filmmaking of the time. The tornado-chaser saga was essentially an amusement park ride situated within a classic narrative structure: a re-marriage plot straight from “His Girl Friday" with exes played by Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton hanging on for dear life while being sucked upward into a titular funnel. Its filmmakers were raised on Hollywood classicism but had new digital tools at their fingertips.

Similarly, “Twisters” existence represents another, different “State of the Industry" statement. This one finds director Lee Isaac Chung, whose 2020 indie “Minari” won Youn Yuh-jung a landmark Supporting Actress Oscar, as the latest to come out of the pipeline of Sundance-winner to blockbuster-helmer. That’s not to say he’s not a smart or interesting artist. To the contrary here and unlike most legacy sequels, his follow-up forgoes expanding or complicating the rag-tag scientist-filled world of “Twister,” unlike how Cameron’s “Alien” and “Terminator” sequels unleashed a plague of “world-building” upon the mainstream for decades to come.

Chung and his team recognize there just isn’t anything worth expanding upon beyond throwing some handsome, smart, semi-traumatized characters up in the air to fall back down in meteorological triumph. His “Twisters" is a big, sturdy, and occasionally stupid actioner of and for every-day people, mashing together equal parts romantic comedy, winking monster movie, and character drama.

“Twisters” is now in theaters everywhere.