Universal Studios
Sequels, prequels, and reboots of both the hard and soft variety have long since become a cornerstone of Hollywood productions, as the money-making prospects of anything even moderately tinged with nostalgia are simply too enticing for film executives to resist.
The latest product to be churned out by the nostalgic legacy sequel mill is Twisters, releasing nearly three decades after the 1996 summer blockbuster Twister took mainstream audiences by storm.
The man responsible for arguably the best legacy sequel to date, Top Gun: Maverick director Joseph Kosinski, has masterminded the story for Twisters, and an overqualified Lee Isaac Chung (Minari) directs with the competence one would expect from such a talented filmmaker.
Daisy Edgar-Jones stars as Kate, our Helen Hunt approximation, and Glen Powell smirks his way through the piece as Kate’s hillbilly counterpart, self-proclaimed tornado wrangler Tyler.
Their teams are also echoes of the 1996 characters, with Kate joining Anthony Ramos’ Javi, an old friend from her past who seeks her out due to her knack for predicting weather patterns being instrumental in him gathering data about tornados, and the pair and their team find themselves pitted against the cocky Tyler and his raucous crew of colorful characters who are in the tornado chasing business for the YouTube following.
At times, much delayed revisits to blockbusters of yesteryear are unashamedly overstuffed with nostalgia bait, but with Twisters, this is startlingly turned down to a minimum, meaning there is no outright fan service aside from the Dorothy technology from the original film making a brief appearance.
Outside of that, the film instead pays its dues to the 1996 film by attempting to rehash the wider narrative framework of its predecessor to tell its story, mixing corny characters with melodrama and destructive weather mayhem, telling any potential viewers familiar with the original film exactly what to expect from the new film.
What Twisters manages to do especially well is recapture the feel of mid-90s summer blockbusters such as, of course, Twister, as well as other man-versus-nature classics such as Dante’s Peak, all of which have a certain charm to them thanks to the competent but formulaic nature of the filmmaking involved.
However, this also means that once you scratch the surface of Twisters, there is not much to write home about, which goes for both the narrative and the characters.
Where the film stumbles in particular is in it not quite getting the balance between the drama and the action right, as there are unnecessarily long slogs between the action sequences. Arguably, taking its time to breathe and letting the audience get to know the characters is integral to viewer investment, but the film simply lacks a decent balance between spectacle and drama, which ultimately lowers the stakes due to a lack of urgency in the non-action scenes.
This is not to say that the film fails at what it is setting to do, as the film starts out strong with an intense opening scene, and the rest of the film also has a handful of twister mayhem of varying scale, but it is simply a little too long in places, and outside of Edgar-Jones and Powell, the characters are not fleshed out enough to allow the audience to fully invest in the narrative.
Extras include deleted scenes and a gag reel.
Twisters is a somewhat uneven affair, which could have benefited from a slightly shorter runtime, and while it does not manage to match the corny heights that made Twister so charming back in the day, there is just something undeniably comforting about a glossy blockbuster that lets you escape the real world for two hours.
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