Twisters Hardly Blows Away Twister

Although Twisters might have gotten the coveted stamp of approval from none other than Steven Spielberg himself, one doesn’t really need to even see the movie to know that it can’t possibly blow away the original Twister, which remains untoppled when compared to this “reboot,” of sorts (or “standalone sequel,” if you prefer). Granted, one of the early speculations about the film was that Kate Carter (Daisy Edgar-Jones) would at least be the daughter of Jo (Helen Hunt) and Bill Harding (Bill Paxton) as a means to link the two films more concretely.

Obviously, that was scrapped, along with Hunt’s potential participation. Initially, though, she was willing to direct the film when its concept was briefly in the hands of Blindspotting writing team Rafael Casal and Daveed Diggs. Their collective “elevator pitch” was to make a movie about “all Black and Brown storm chasers” (in the end, the Black and Brown folks would turn out to be “beta” characters as usual). Needless to say, that premise didn’t pan out. According to Diggs, “All I’ll say is there was an opportunity where we were talking about that, and it didn’t happen, and the reasons that it didn’t happen are potentially shady. But shady in the way that we know the industry is shady.”

Hunt would echo her disappointment about that concept not being pursued, noting, “We could barely get a meeting. And this is in June of 2020 when it was all about diversity. And it would have been so cool. There was a [historically Black college and university] where we wanted it to take place, and a rocket science club, and in this one, they shoot the rockets into the tornado. It was going to be so cool.” Alas, the level of “coolness” audiences will have to settle for is Glen Powell playing a YouTube influencer named Tyler Owens that garners followers by acting like an average American living in an idiocracy. That is to say, Tyler does extremely stupid, reckless shit whenever he’s near a tornado, calling himself the “Tornado Wrangler” and parroting the catchphrase, “If you feel it, chase it.”

But, of course, if anyone “feels it,” with her tornado-oriented “Spidey sense,” it’s Kate. Unfortunately for Oklahomans, she’s been on a hiatus from storm-chasing for the past five years. For, as the first roughly fifteen minutes of the intro shows us, she’s traumatized by a very big loss to the point where she gives up chasing altogether. Though, to be honest, it’s still not as bad as what happened to Jo in the opening scene of Twister, which takes place in June of 1969, twenty-seven years before we see grown-up Jo as a storm chaser. And it is that formative event in 1969 that compels her to become one, for she has to bear witness to her father’s death as he tries to protect Jo, her mother and their dog, Toby, from an F5 twister. The “F” standing for Fujita scale (a.k.a. F-scale), which rates the intensity of a tornado based on the damage done to buildings and vegetation, with F5 being the highest on the scale. As he clings for as long and hard as he can to the door of their underground tornado shelter, Jo’s father is eventually snapped up by the tornado, along with the door itself.

Thus, Jo is possessed with a lifelong need to understand as much as possible about tornados so that she can do everything in her power to keep more people living within the jurisdiction of “Tornado Alley” from getting hurt and/or losing someone they love. An obsession shared by Kate, even if she is a far more lily-livered version of Jo. And as for those wondering why anyone would continue to live in an area that is known for constantly being destroyed by Mother Nature, well, perhaps it’s worth quoting Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song: “And where would we go, we have nowhere else to go, it costs a lot of money to go someplace else.” For those who would argue still that it costs more money to keep rebuilding, then perhaps another mode of logic from Prophet Song will help explain the inclination to stay: “…if you’ve lived in one place all your life the idea of living someplace else is impossible, it’s what do you call it, neurological, it’s wired into the brain, we’ll just dig in, that’s what we’ll do, what else are you supposed to do anyhow, I don’t know where else I’d go, they can drag me out in a coffin.”

That’s pretty much how much Jo feels, to the point where she’s willing to sacrifice her marriage to stay committed to the place she grew up in. Which is why Twister begins with Bill “blowing in through town” (if one will pardon the expression) to get Jo to sign their divorce papers so that he can get married to “safe” and “secure” Melissa Reeves (Jami Gertz), a reproductive therapist.

But Bill’s past hits him head-on once he revisits Jo and their ragtag gang of storm chasers, including Dusty (Philip Seymour Hoffman), who is the first to call him by his old nickname, “The Extreme,” Rabbit (Alan Ruck), Joey (Joey Slotnick) and Sanders (Sean Whalen, whose only role more complex than this one was starring in Michael Bay’s 1993 Got Milk? commercial). Their excitement about his “return” keeps prompting him to say, “I’m not back,” a line that will be used by Kate in Twisters as a nod to Bill. This in addition to her also picking up a dandelion (whereas Bill opted for a pile of dirt) and “feeling” nature to see which direction the next twister is going to land in. Another overt parallel is Cary Elwes’ smarmy character, Jonas Miller, who comes across a lot like Tyler Owens…at first. After all, here you have an exploitative opportunist looking to cash in on all the glory of storm chasing. Except that, unlike Jonas, Tyler actually does have the grit and pureness of motive to back up his irksome braggadocio.

And yet, still, somehow, one might expect that he ends up with the same fate as Jonas—which is to be swept up into a twister as karmic recompense for being an asshole. On this subject, it bears remarking that the special effects of Twister are still more iconic and mesmerizing, including the indelible image of a cow swirling in the storm. In any case, fortunately for Tyler, Twisters screenwriter Mark L. Smith saw fit to bill him as a “cowboy scientist” at the beginning of the second act, setting the stage for how Tyler is actually a modest, altruistic “genius,” of sorts, when it comes to all things tornado. The Bill to her Jo, as it were. Even though Javi (Anthony Ramos, the lone person in the movie with a connection to Blindspotting now) would clearly like to fulfill that role. Indeed, one of the more irksome aspects of Twisters is that it refuses to definitively say that Kate chooses Tyler over Javi—even though it’s fairly obvious she does. This achieved calculatedly by not having the two oblige the audience at any point with a “Hollywood kiss” befitting such a blatant Hollywood movie (evidently, this was a Spielberg note). After all, the hope is still to appeal to Gen Z audiences that apparently blanch at such “boomer-y” displays of sexual affection.

Lack of besos aside, one need only look at the difference between the two posters to immediately grasp that one movie possesses the kind of mettle that died out after the 90s, while the other has the sanitized, whitewashed feel of a superhero movie. To that point, it bears noting that the director of Twister, Jan de Bont, wanted it to be “the last great action movie not shot on a soundstage,” rightly intuiting the industry shift toward everything being CGI’d. While Twisters does the original the courtesy of continuing to shoot in actual Oklahoma, it nonetheless lacks the emotional spark of Twister, largely propelled by the tension between Jo and Bill as they each try to sidestep their enduring feelings for one another with the very effective distraction of an imminent natural disaster. This tension, in part, stemmed from Michael Crichton and then wife Anne-Marie Martin using His Girl Friday as the basis for the dynamic, as well as the concept of throwing two exes together as a result of one of them enticing the other back into a profession they’re trying to abandon.

While Twisters doesn’t have the same knack for conjuring up much emotional investment, it might get some people, at the very least, annoyed by the fact that, throughout the movie, there’s this idea at play that one shouldn’t judge a “shitkicker” by their proverbial cover. That there’s more to them than meets the eye. In short, that they “know things” that no city slicker or “fancy schmancy” university graduate ever could. Paired with the “down home” imagery of American flags, rodeos and roadside diners, Twisters arrives at a time when the U.S. is about to have yet another major reckoning with itself regarding its true identity. Is it an at least slightly educated place or a total idiocracy?

Come November, it seems the latter category will hold true. And Twisters is part and parcel of making “red” America feel okay about that. Whereas Twister had the advantage of being apolitical, released during one of the most status quo, apathetic election years of the last few decades. But that has nothing to do with why it’s the better film. Even if Twisters, for all its lack, has managed to not only surpass box office expectations, but actually surpass the box office receipts that Twister garnered during its own first weekend. Alas, you know what they say: “tastes change.” Though that doesn’t always mean for the better.