Despite featuring groundbreaking CG dinosaurs, Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park paved the way for a renaissance of disaster movies in the nineties, including Jan de Bont’s Twister. Co-written by Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton, the movie focused on a group of amateur but spirited storm chasers trying to deploy a tornado research device during a severe outbreak in Oklahoma. Among these chasers is an estranged married couple on the brink of divorce. From the impressive visual effects and the irresistible chemistry between Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton, Twister was one of the better instalments from that era, even if it doesn’t attempt to reinvent the disaster movie.
In this current age of legacy sequels, nobody was asking for a standalone sequel to Jan de Bont’s original, and yet here we are. Without any of the original cast involved, Twisters centers on Kate Cooper (Daisy Edgar-Jones), a meteorologist and former storm chaser who is left emotionally detached after a tragedy involving the strong winds five years ago. But when she is approached by an old colleague (Anthony Ramos) to return to Oklahoma to work with a new team and new technologies, Kate catches the attention of “tornado wrangler” Tyler Owens (Glen Powell).
Much like Top Gun: Maverick – whose director Joseph Kosinski actually conceived the story here – Twisters written by Mark L. Smith pretty much sticks to the template of its predecessor, in which a female protagonist is suffering from a past tragedy and along with a ragtag team of storm chasers, hopes to find redemption in her pursuit of the strong winds. As before, it plays up the tropes of the disaster movie, which has to balance the spectacle with the human drama, including a whole subplot involving greedy businessmen trying to capitalize on the twisters’ destruction of people’s homes, which is a conflict that you will know gets resolved. As we learned from Jaws, skipped the soap opera about greedy dealings and politics, and cut straight to the chase.
Best known for directing the semi-autobiographical film Minari, it may seem odd for Lee Isaac Chung to step into the realm of blockbuster filmmaking, despite directing an episode in the third season of The Mandalorian. CGI has achieved so much since 1996, and while disaster maestro Roland Emmerich has destroyed the Earth multiple times (fictionally, of course), the sight of CG twisters nowadays doesn’t provide that sense of awe. That being said, there is still a sense of danger that Chung brings to the set-pieces, whether it is the daredevil antics of the chasers themselves, or the desperation of trying to get people into shelters.
Another benefit that adds to the film’s engagement is the strong cast. Although Daisy Edgar-Jones is the central lead who balances the fun with an emotional character arc, she is outshined by her co-star. Being cast as the tornado wrangler requires a showiness, and thus Glen Powell devours the screen with charisma, proving once again his status of a movie star. Despite the line-up of supporting players including Anthony Ramos and the future Superman David Corenswet, there isn’t a great deal of focus over the aforementioned storm chasers, leaving performers like Katy O’Brien and Sasha Lane underused.
1 Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment Login