Twisters

 

 

Lee Isaac Chung's Twisters is much more pointed in its ethical and ecological implications than its nearly 30-year-old predecessor, the singular Twister, which starred Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt.

 

Chung's nailbiter of a cautionary tale stars Daisy Edgar-Jones (Normal People, Where the Crawdads Sing) and Glen Powell (Hit Man, Anyone But You) as tornado chasers whose paths converge in Oklahoma, where an unprecedented series of storms have wiped out small towns and will likely do even more damage.

 

When we meet her, Edgar-Jones' Kate is a doctoral student in meteorology who loses close friends and fellow researchers during a chase. Five years later, she's left fieldwork for a job in New York, tracking powerful storms, far away from the action. 

 

A former classmate and researcher, Javi (Anthony Ramos), talks Kate into coming to Oklahoma, which is her home state, to help him test a new method of measuring tornadoes. His work is funded by wealthy sponsors who have their own agendas.

 

Still scarred from her near-death experience, Kate takes a while to get her sea legs again, but once she sees Powell's pretty boy Tyler, a YouTube "tornado wrangler," turn her serious work into a circus she is back in the game, hoping to test a theory that tornadoes can be "tamed" with the right combination of chemicals and a proper delivery system.

 

As I told my screening companion today, any film coming out of Steven Spielberg's production studios will be visually stunning, and Twisters is no exception. The implausibility of several of the set pieces do not detract from the utter jaw-dropping effect of seeing demon winds tear through a town, shredding streets and houses like paper.

 

The movie's story of personal disillusionment and redemption is secondary to its warning that such storms will become more and more frequent and deadly if real action isn't taken. I don't know if the science proposed by Twisters is real, but the message is certainly well-taken and vitally important.