Billed as neither a sequel nor a reboot of Twister (1996) what we have in Twisters is an enjoyable old fashion disaster movie that owes more to the original than producers would like us to believe.
Edgar-Jones stars as Kate Cooper, a former storm chaser haunted by a devastating encounter with a tornado during her college years, a terrific action filled prologue, now studies storm patterns on screens safely in New York City. She is lured back to the open plains by her friend, Javi (Anthony Ramos) to test a ground-breaking new tracking system.
Out in the field she crosses paths with Tyler Owens (Glen Powell), a charming and reckless social-media superstar who thrives on posting his storm-chasing adventures with his raucous crew, the more dangerous the better.
Lee Isaac Chung, the Oscar-nominated writer-director of Minari, seems like a strange choice as nothing in his previous directorial work points him in this direction, other than perhaps the one episode he directed of The Mandalorian, but he plays it pretty safe and sticks pretty much to the formula that made Twister so enjoyable and successful. If fact he sticks to the formula so much that at times if feels as if he’s just regurgitating some of the action scenes from the earlier film. In place of a drive in movie theatre we now have a baseball game.
Strangely the CGI appears to have went backwards since 1996 with the special effects looking like, funnily enough, computer graphics. Bring back the days when special effects involved dropping tractors and combine harvesters out of the sky.
Twisters isn’t the ground breaking disaster movie some would have you believe. What it is though is a fun summer popcorn movie that owes more than they would have you believe to its superior original.
