Taglines: Chase. Ride. Survive.
Twisters movie storyline. Daisy Edgar-Jones stars as Kate Cooper, a former storm chaser haunted by a devastating encounter with a tornado during her college years who now studies storm patterns on screens safely in New York City. She is lured back to the open plains by her friend, Javi (Golden Globe nominee Anthony Ramos, In the Heights) to test a groundbreaking new tracking system.
There, she crosses paths with Tyler Owens (Glen Powell), the charming and reckless social-media superstar who thrives on posting his storm-chasing adventures with his raucous crew, the more dangerous the better. As storm season intensifies, terrifying phenomena never seen before are unleashed, and Kate, Tyler and their competing teams find themselves squarely in the paths of multiple storm systems converging over central Oklahoma in the fight of their lives.
Twisters is an American disaster film directed by Lee Isaac Chung with a screenplay by Mark L. Smith from a story by Joseph Kosinski. Produced by Frank Marshall and Patrick Crowley, it is a standalone sequel to the 1996 film Twister. The film stars Daisy Edgar-Jones, Glen Powell, Anthony Ramos, Maura Tierney, Brandon Perea, Daryl McCormack, Sasha Lane, Kiernan Shipka, and Nik Dodani. Twisters was released by Universal Pictures in North America and Warner Bros. Pictures internationally on July 19, 2024.
Film Review for Twisters
Twisters, a run-toward-disaster action film, is not without its charms but not as goofily fun as perhaps it could be. There’s not a flying cow in sight. Nearly thirty years after Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt in Twister chased storms with soap-bubble sensors, Pepsi can propellers, and a memorable airborne animal, Twisters follows a new batch of storm-chasers with the same gung-ho spirit, minus the duct tape. The tornado effects are impressive, but the story is as mercurial as the weather—a little gravitas here, some cheekiness there—with an ending that leaves an anticlimactic aftertaste.
Like 1996’s Twister, which grossed nearly $500 million worldwide, Twisters focuses on a woman storm-chaser with emotional trauma. Oklahoma native Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones, War of the Worlds) ditched the plains for a desk job as a New York City meteorologist after losing her boyfriend and two pals in college. The group had tried to “tame” a tornado using Kate’s brainstorm that certain polymers could suck up the moisture, causing a twister to collapse. Of course, this meant driving into harm’s way, with fatal results.
Five years later, another college friend, Javi (Anthony Ramos, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts), persuades Kate to return to Oklahoma to triangulate these phenomena using state-of-the-art tech from his time in the military. Javi’s company supplies up-to-date weather data to developers, who after a storm pay the uninsured and underinsured residents damages.
For some reason, the rough-and-tumble crew of YouTube “tornado wrangler” Tyler (Glen Powell, Hit Man) looks down at this, although they give survivors T-shirts, water, and sandwiches. A former rodeo cowboy, Tyler and his crew also have tech, including a drone and drills to anchor his truck into the ground so he can shoot fireworks into tornados for views.
The weather-nerd exuberance – “We’ve got striation!” – recalls the dumb fun of the original Twister, but compared to the dour Kate, Tyler loped in from another movie. Powell makes him more appealing than insufferable, calling Kate “city girl” in a way that’s more flirtatious than snide. The script by Mark L. Smith (The Boys in the Boat), with a story by Joseph Kosinski (The Dig), gives Tyler a line that hits the sweet spot for the lunacy of storm chasing: “You don’t face your fears; you ride ’em.”
Twisters tries to weave this with Kate working through her grief and giving the storm-collapsing idea another shot, but it’s a bumpy ride. There’s an intriguing point that skirts climate change, with Kate’s mom (Maura Tierney, American Rust) mentioning higher prices for wheat and seed, but the film doesn’t pursue this, and it’s not clear what triangulating storm data does for the developers, either. Granted, the earlier film also had a threadbare plot, with storm-chasers gathering data for a better early warning system—something apparently still in the works all these years later as people still run for shelter with minutes to spare.
The twisters are the true stars here, wrecking a rodeo, a motel, and even a small-town movie theater. Working on a broader canvas than the intimacy of 2020’s indie Minari, director Lee Isaac Chung (The Mandalorian) uses ample wide shots to make the red-dirt roads pop against the expansive green fields and gray-black clusters of clouds swirling with doom. The action is clear to follow, even riding into a twister for a view from above, and the sound design nicely threads in the voice of Kate’s lost beloved on the howling wind. Twisters isn’t a barnburner, but fans of Twister might find reason enough to get carried away.
Twisters (2024)
Directed by: Lee Isaac Chung
Starring: Daisy Edgar-Jones, Glen Powell, Anthony Ramos, Maura Tierney, Brandon Perea, Daryl McCormack, Sasha Lane, Kiernan Shipka, Tunde Adebimpe, Katy O’Brian, David Corenswet
Screenplay by: Mark L. Smith
Production Design by: Patrick M. Sullivan Jr.
Cinematography by: Dan Mindel
Film Editing by: Terilyn A. Shropshire
Costume Design by: Eunice Jera Lee
Set Decoration by: Missy Parker
Art Direction by: Steve Christensen, Stefan Gesek, Ryan Grossheim, Jessie Haddad, Oana Bogdan Miller, Domenic Silvestri
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for intense action and peril, some language and injury images.
Distributed by: Universal Pictures (North America), Warner Bros. Pictures (International)
Release Date: July 19, 2024
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