Mother Nature and her capacity for devastation plays the titular villain in Twisters (that’s Twisters with an ‘s’), the standalone sequel to Twister, a big-budget disaster film from 1996 produced by Steven Spielberg, co-written by noted science-fiction novelist Michael Crichton (Jurassic Park, Andromeda Strain) and directed by ace-cinematographer-turned-helmer Jan de Bont (Speed).

That film clung hard and fast to a group of gung-ho, adrenaline junkie storm chasers (Bill Paxton, Helen Hunt, Philip Seymour Hoffman, amongst others) who ran after tornadoes for the betterment of mankind. Being scientists, they had designed small orb-like sensors that would transmit intel needed to create an early warning system for storms. The system would expand the warning time from three to 15 minutes. The extra minutes, as painfully shown through big-budget set-pieces, would have saved a lot of lives.

In Twisters, we’ve long gone past the need for early warning systems — here, it is about cutting down the power of the tornadoes themselves. The devices, that once again needed to be launched into the eye of the storms, look eerily similar to the old orb-like sensors — an obvious homage, I am sure — and the rough-and-tough storm-chasing crew is just as gung-ho and daredevil-ish in nature. Still, for a film that gets so much right, something feels oddly amiss.

Advertised to be shot on Kodak film stock, the director, Lee Issac Chung (of the multi-Oscar nominated foreign film Minari), is adamant on sustaining the old-school Americana, big-budget blockbuster feel of the first movie.

For a film that gets so much right, something feels oddly amiss with Twisters

The story, plotted by Joseph Kosinski (Oblivion, Top Gun: Maverick) who was once set to direct the film, is perhaps just as simple and Americana-prone as Twister, and deliberately avoids cliches one associates with today’s event movies — although by doing so, one feels it is all but ripping off the1996 film as far as plot points go.

Despite the obvious care it takes to stick to the atmosphere of the previous movie, there is a lack of engagement with both the young cast of characters and the wrath of nature they witness.

The youngsters are led by Kate (Daisy-Edgar Jones), a young woman who loses her buddies in their storm-chasing experiments, her best bud Javi (Anthony Ramos), who survived the ill-fated twister, and the cowboy-like token hero Tyler (Glen Powell), who heads a company that supports and profiteers from the devastation.

As characters, they are ‘meh’ — a trait they share with the twisters.

Shot with sensible restraint by cinematographer Dan Mindel (Enemy of the State, Star Trek), and helmed with just as much soberness, Twisters is a pale imitation of the original, and herein lies the dilemma: how can one get so much right, yet still come out inadequate?

The answer is obvious: the tone and approach.

De Bont’s film, though not a work of a maverick, kept one engaged. That film introduced characters in the midst of running action sequences, and then kept on developing them through pertinent and brief bits of exposition that gave insights to who these people were.

The information was perfectly placed inside the goldilocks’ zone — meaning it wasn’t too overbearing or verbose, nor too vague; it was ‘just right.’ That art of balancing and astuteness in screenwriting is all but gone one realises, and with that finesse went the depiction of villains.

In the new film, the twisters are just that: gargantuan whirlwinds of computer-generated effects. In the former, they had a distinct ‘nature’ (sorry about the pun). Thirty years later, one still feels the gravity of the horrors they brought, even when they were not wrecking farmlands and communities on-screen. Today, they feel like flimsy CGI constructs that hardly trigger one’s emotions.

But then again, by and large, that’s what modern movies have turned into, an aspiration that doesn’t quite deliver the results.

Twisters is rated PG-13 and released by HKC Films for Warner Bros. It features everything one sees and feels from its trailers

Published in Dawn, ICON, July 28th, 2024