Twisters 2024
When Kate the storm-chasing genius tells Tyler the tornado wrangler that she never got the chance to execute her plan to stop a tornado in its tracks, Tyler gives Kate a bold invitation. “You want one?,” he asks her with a gleam in his eye. Together the two of them look up toward the heavens toward the next approaching storm with the intoxicating hope of adventure coursing through their veins.
Lee Isaac Chung’s Twisters could certainly be labeled a climate change film or a film built to illustrate Tyler’s pithy maxim “You don’t face your fears, you ride ‘em.“ More than that, though, it’s a film about that look of anticipation in Kate and Tyler’s eyes as they get ready to spring to their feet and chase another storm. It’s about that look, and it’s about the fact that two people shared that look and that hope for the chase.
Whether planned or by accident, that subject makes Twisters a love letter to Howard Hawks’s 1939 film Only Angels Have Wings. In that grand and noble old Hollywood film, pilots hang out in a tiny South American harbor town itching to answer the call to fly airmail through a treacherous pass in the Andes Mountains. In other words, Hawks’s pilots are itching to fly into certain danger just as this film’s storm chasers can’t wait for the next tornado to launch them out of their seats. The characters in both of these films share not only this expectation of adventure, but also the complicated memory of past traumas related to their professions. Those past traumas, just as here, bleed into questions of romance in the present. Is romance really possible in the shadow of what has been lost in years gone by.
While the similarities to the Hawks film are real and fascinating, we dare not follow that trail too far lest we make this 2024 film sound like either a serious drama or a film for the ages. Though Only Angels was both, Twisters is neither. The good news, though, is Chung’s sequel to Jan de Bont’s 1996 film is just as insistent as I am that it is neither. It knows just what kind of storm it is meant to be.
Sure, it flirts with being a more serious movie. It has moments of characters developing and moving toward new things and new understandings. It has appreciations of social justice. It even has small mystical moments that remind us that Chung once made an astonishing film (Lucky Life) based on a single poem by Gerald Stern. It has Tyler musing that this pursuit is “part science, part religion.” Yet, no. It only spends moments in those serious places. If a film like this had camped on those beaches for too long, it would have become its own joke.
Instead, this is a film that ultimately knows it is made for the chase and the spectacle. By the time we get to the final twenty minutes, that much is abundantly clear. These final sequences and the places they take us are loud, cinematic, and ridiculous in mostly good and self-aware ways.
I will admit that the movie almost wears us out by putting us and its storm-chasers repeatedly in the center of the “the big one.” One more big storm, in fact, would have made us limp out of this film in exhaustion (thank you, Mr. Chung, for not making the Oscar-chasing three-hour version of this story…the one with too little editing and too many tearful speeches!). The movie also does, sometimes, depend on the serendipitous arrival of a big storm to wake itself up when its narrative threatens to drag.
Thankfully, though, there are so many good things going on here that we can easily overlook the narrative problems. Of course, the visuals and the sound are tremendous…Stephen Spielberg as executive producer would not have allowed any less. Perhaps even more crucial to keeping me in this film, however, are the wealth of colorful characters edging their way into these busy storm chase scenes. Glen Powell and Daisy Edgar-Jones are just fine as Tyler and Kate. Independently and together, they hold the screen with their ebullient charm.
Yet then we also have Brandon Perea, Sasha Lane, and Tunde Adebimpe (as members of Tyler’s YouTube crew) registering in such rich and full-bodied ways even at the same time as they are zooming around in a frenzy going after those storms. We marvel at David Corenswet whose character, with only a handful of scenes, goes from taciturn comic relief to morally complexity. Rounding out the deep bench supporting cast is a terrific Maura Tierney as Kate’s mother and, my very favorite, Harry Hadden-Paton as Ben, the eager British journalist who got into way more than he bargained for when he got into Tyler’s car to drum up the big story.
In the end, then, Twisters is a film that knows that the chase is its reason for being. We chase along with these colorful people, and we enjoy being part of that chase. As fine as the chase itself is, it is the characters that invite us to come along on it and keep the whole thing from being too much. They invite us into a world that is very much like that world which Jean Arthur’s Bonnie wondered at in Only Angels Have Wings. A world in which, whether flying the Andes or chasing storms, “it’s like being in love with a buzz saw.”
