“We gotta get everyone in the movie theatre!” somebody yells, as the tornado gouges its way through a small Oklahoman town, chewing up every person, plant and structure in its path. In Twisters’ climactic set piece, it’s a cinema that helps save the day – while doubling as the stage for one of the most inspired action scenes in years.
But that shout also feels like a blustery cri de coeur from the film itself, which makes the best argument this year for the enduring power of collective big-screen entertainment. Jan de Bont’s 1996 original, Twister – singular – was a diverting (and fondly remembered) summer thrill ride. But this follow-up, directed by Minari’s Lee Isaac Chung, vastly improves on it in all regards.
A film many might have written off as a faintly desperate revival of an ageing blockbuster brand – perhaps with some perfunctory climate change finger-wagging thrown in for the likes – is in fact the most wholehearted, warm-blooded, meticulously crafted good time at the movies since Top Gun: Maverick.
Neither remake nor sequel, it’s simply a fresh run at a premise that began life in the early 1990s as a visual effects test at Industrial Light & Magic – can computers generate a photo-real tornado? – around which Michael Crichton and Anne-Marie Martin later built their storm-chaser plot.
Of course these days, the computers’ abilities aren’t in question: it’s the scripts that tend to be the problem. But Mark L Smith, who wrote Twisters’ screenplay, and Top Gun: Maverick’s Joseph Kosinski, who devised its story, have come up with something strikingly in keeping with the 90s blockbuster vibe.
Its central personality clash – two breeds of nerd, brow to brow in a crisis – is pure Crichton. One is Kate Cooper (Normal People’s Daisy Edgar-Jones), a gifted meteorologist, still cowed by a disastrous field experiment in which a tornado claimed the lives of three friends. The other is Tyler Owens (Glen Powell), a swaggering self-styled ‘tornado wrangler’ with a million followers on YouTube, and an ego that could out-blow most of the storms he pursues.
The two descend on Oklahoma for an especially torrid tornado season: Kate with her former colleague Javi (Anthony Ramos), now head of a hi-tech startup which tracks destructive weather patterns for unscrupulous developers. Javi’s thwarted crush on Kate is a beautifully underplayed detail left to fizz away throughout the film, and the perfect example of the kind of humanising micro-detail Twisters gets exactly right.
Anyway, it’s science and calculation versus passion and instinct. Now, see if you can guess who eventually switches teams. The visual effects tower and terrify, but crucially, never as effects. The prevailing sense during every chase, escape and scramble for cover, is one of watching real people battle nerve-wilting odds.
The formula is so simple it’s amazing it ever fell out of fashion: everyday heroes you can’t help but root for (Edgar-Jones and the never-more-Tom-Cruise-like Powell are both magnetic, with campfire-crackling chemistry), a deep well of fun supporting turns (Downton Abbey’s Harry Hadden-Paton is a hoot as a visiting British journalist), and expert, light-touch direction from Chung that foregrounds human experience at every moment.
Time and again, he deploys the classic Spielbergian trick of spending more time watching his actors react to danger – loose-jawed and lantern-eyed – than ogling the danger itself. And time and again, I caught my own expression mirroring theirs.
In cinemas from next Wednesday
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