Twisters

Or: Stormy Weather

Ah yes, a tale as old as time. Talented young woman returns to her natural environs from the big city, reconnecting with her corporate shill comrade who’s always kind of had a thing for her. Instead of igniting her colleagues hopeless hopes, our heroine meets a rugged, flannel wearing, heart of gold type fella who slowly charms her out of her high collared corporate wear into something more natural and finally cracks her frosty exterior to show her the true meaning of … checks notes meteorology and weather manipulation.

Twisters, the non-sequel follow-up to the 1996 blockbuster of similar but singular name, is a decent movie. It’s well paced, visually impressive and has pointy cowboy boots that wills top on the requisite parts of its viewers. It’s also bloodless and non-confrontational, letting us fill in the more emotionally fraught or morally ambiguous moments in our own time. Not that being bloodless is necessarily a bad thing. I was pleasantly surprised by the time the theater lights came up that not one character had been impaled by rebar or beheaded by airborne siding. The unfortunates are simply born skywards, whisked out of the narrative. The movie starts out with five colleges students chasing a storm. From the moment they roll out of their sleeping bags and start bantering I could smell burning bread through the theater: these kids were toast. The manner in which they were born to their deaths (along with a low investment cast of had-it-coming fools and low priority civilians throughout) both shows the storms uncaring power, and an authorial desire to get back to the what Twisters really is, a Hallmark tale of T’woo Wuv .

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, either. You have a formula, and high quality ingredients why deviate from the recipe. Our preternaturally gifted weather woman is Kate Carter (Daisy Edgar-Jones), trauma-touched but still polite and professional, only goosed into life by Tyler Owens (Glen Powell), down-home Tornado Wrangler and Youtube star, who rocks around the midwest in his souped up truck with his True Friends, but can’t seem to shake the girl who knows more about weather than he does. The axel for both is Antony Ramos’s Javi, ex-storm chaser, turned military, turned corporate, turned storm chaser again. Stuck inside the suit and the hi-tech white sided fleet of cars, Javi is still decent at heart, a man who wants to help, both Kate and his community, but just has bedded down with too many dogs. He’s a wonderful third wheel that keeps the rolling romance grounded and speaks highly of Ramos’s gifts for nuanced emotion, splintered hurt, and humble charm.

Edgar-Jones and Powell are well matched, in the rom-com front, he’s mischievous but chivalrous, and she takes us from who Kate used to be, to the shell she is now, and finally fill herself out to be a proper hero, ready to face the 300 mph winds that stole her found family and her life. Both mix up a credible bit of chemistry, but their flashiest sparks are incidental, when Tyler and Kate are working together on their shared passion that has nothing to do with the heart.

Like it’s costars, Twisters similarly lands its best blows sideways. The most gut wrenching moment of loss comes not from the wide swaths of destruction wrought by the increasingly violent weather, but Kate’s return to her childhood home (to the true striking chords of Lainey Wilson’s “Out of Oklahoma”) that cuts straight to found footage from Kate’s own Lost Leon, Jeb (Daryl McCormack), celebrating her genius and her hope to tame tornadoes. On the flip side, the most horrifying visions are not the doubled twisters, nor the fire tornado that’s born from an oil refinery, but a dark cloud in the driving rain, that flashes as, one by one, the power lines are torn away in a burst of sparks. Simple, surreal, terrifying, a force of nature that cares nothing for the works of human hands, and perhaps not even True Love can vanquish it. But, what’s the point of having a movie, if True Love can’t try?