Arguably the whole point of the original Twister was “Look at our cool new CGI special effects. Check out those particle simulations, yo!”. I wasn’t very impressed by that movie back in the day but it survived a recent rewatch better. Twisters kind of doesn’t need to exist though… there have been a lot of B movie tornado movies and Twisters is just one of them with a budget. We already know they can do these effects, so the flick had better come up with some great disaster movie thrills or characters that matter…. and it struggles.
The flick is about crazy stormchasers who probably saw the crazy stormchaser movie back in the 90s and said “Yeah, I’m that crazy too!”. And, get this… these stormchasers are competing with rival stormchasers to get into the path of tornados and launch their doodads and googaws into their funnels. Suck zone, yo!
And to tamp down the sarcasm a bit, the competing stormchasers angle does look very VERY familiar to the original film… but they were wise enough to add a… twist! It was a bit of a surprise but it also made me wonder… and? So what? It doesn’t help that Glenn Powell looks like Daisy Edgar-Jones’ dad so I kept wondering what this mixed up chemistry was all about (to be fair, he’s 35 and she’s 26 in real life).
Not that all the flailing, screaming humans matter… we’re here for the pulse-pounding action of driving towards storms. And we get that… multiple extended sequences of people driving towards storms. Which maybe has a limit on how interesting or thrilling that is. The sick, sad thing is these sequences were done better in Twister. Somehow.
The twister action is mostly not very thrilling. And, like I mentioned above, it doesn’t have the wow factor the original film had going for it. But the final disaster sequence is better than I expected and will make you wonder about the choices you make if you sit close to the screen in a movie theater. Or decide to drive your crazy person stormchaser truck directly at a tornado. Yee-haw?
Twisters did very little for me. It’s a good looking film full of rather generic characters doing a job that sounds cool on paper but isn’t very thrilling on the screen. And it’s not that the tornados look bad, it’s just that we’ve seen these effects before and they didn’t up the ante. It’s just a limited range disaster movie.
Score: 74