Twisters is a sequel, kind of, to the 1996 disaster flick starring Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton. It’s a different kind of film though, thanks to the nearly thirty year difference in special effects technology and the patient direction of Minari director Lee Isaac Chung. If you’ve seen Chung’s directorial debut, then you know he cares deeply about the people populating his films.
Here, we follow Kate Carter (Daisy Edgar-Jones) who leads a team of storm chasers to try an experiment which would lower the intensity of the storm. This ends poorly and the film jumps ahead five years later to a time when Carter has withdrawn from the storm chasing space she once loved. Instead, she’s in NYC, safely removed from the plains and their twisters. Lured back into the field to help a friend, Carter finds herself attracted to and repulsed by a glory hound, Youtube “Storm Wrangler” Tyler Owens (Glen Powell). This is a romantic movie, a disaster movie, a coming of age movie, a redemption movie.
Some of what happens is paint by numbers in terms of how the plot plays out. But the special effects are solid, and Chung’s direction moves us through the upward trend of Carter’s life as she begins to peel back the layers of tragedy that drove her from Oklahoma. Give some credit to Mark L. Smith’s script, another well-worked story by the guy who wrote The Revenant and The Boys in the Boat. Edgar-Jones provides the straight man for the “bad guy” Powell plays, but we figure out he’s not the bad guy we think he is.
While disaster films aren’t really my thing, this one has more heart than most – and doesn’t solely rely on special effects to wow us into forgetting that we haven’t really been engaged. Leave it to Chung to make us care about swirling winds inside and outside of the human soul.
