Flasz On Film

Directed by Jan de Bont, Twister became the second highest-grossing movie of 1996, sandwiched between Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day and Brian De Palma’s Mission: Impossible. However, despite its profitability (nearly half a billion dollars worldwide is nothing to sniff at), it hasn’t spawned a sequel… until now.  

Well, arguably, the reason why it took nearly three decades for Twisters to materialize—and at no point do I want to even consider the possibility that the movie was desperately flung from one corner of the mythical development hell to another for the majority of that time; in fact, Joseph Kosinski apparently pitched this movie to Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy in 2020—is because there is no obvious way to “sequelize” a simple standalone disaster movie about tornado chasers.  

Like, how? Do they chase bigger tornadoes? Could we get one in the spirit of Jaws: The Revenge where tornadoes are sentient and become chasing the storm chasers around the world like some sort of poltergeist-esque entities? Now, I have not rewatched the de Bont movie in a while, so it might be a false memory I shall now refer to, but something tells me the tornadoes in Twister already roared in a rather animalistic manner. Or maybe it was Cary Elwes butchering his lines, who could tell? 

In any case, Twister wasn’t a movie you could just add a sequel to without everything starting to look borderline deranged… until the nostalgia sequel genie got let out of his lamp, which arguably changed the landscape of making sequels to movies that either didn’t need one or couldn’t necessarily spawn one with ease. Now, all Kosinski and the gang needed to do was to essentially remake the original movie, hark back to some of its elements the viewership would have a nostalgic connection to and bring a few old cast members back for a cameo performance or a baton-passing event where the new cast would inherit the series and the old ones would either bite the dust or end up sent off on their well-deserved retirement… having defeated another bunch of tornadoes or something.  

By the way, ChatGPT suggests that a fun collective noun for the word “tornado” is either “fury”, “swirl” or “chaos.” 

Coming back to the subject, this is where the problems are because calling up old cast members to come back and chase another chaos of tornadoes might be difficult on account of at least two of them having passed away in the intervening years and I think we can all agree that getting anybody else back for another hurrah would have only made it even more blatantly obvious how much we all miss Bill Paxton and Philip Seymour Hoffman. So, that’s a non-starter.  

Also, how do you even nostalgify Twister in the first place? Are there any elements of this film that became cultural touchstones or at least were memorable enough for anyone to think about them the second the film title is mentioned in a casual conversation? What would that be? The cow being flung in the air, mooing helplessly? That scene where a tractor falls out of the sky and Bill Paxton drives through a house that just casually rolls in front of his car? Actually, that’s a great scene, so maybe that one would be good to bring to the table. Or maybe we should make any of those people related to anyone? But then we’d come back round to the first problem because they would have to come back for a cameo and then these memories of not having Paxton and Hoffman around would percolate to the surface immediately. You can’t win. 

But this is Hollywood, baby, which means that just because everything suggests it’s a bad idea to make a sequel to a movie doesn’t mean it would stop a movie from happening. If there is a will and a good opportunity to make a few hundred million dollars, you can bet your behind that a movie’s going to happen, even if it wouldn’t make any sense at all and it would realistically make the aforementioned Jaws: The Revenge look like a well-conceptualized sequel in its own right.  

And that’s how I imagine Twisters came together as a movie. Directed by Lee Isaac Chung who somehow wandered into this production having made Minari, a movie that doesn’t suggest one bit that the filmmaker would have any interest in helming a populist blockbuster, let alone a nostalgia sequel to a movie nobody knew for decades how to make a sequel to, Twisters is essentially a soft remake of Twister where we meet a young storm chaser Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones) who having lost her crew and retired from driving into the eye of the storm is recruited by her former colleague Javi (Anthony Ramos) to do some more storm hunting. He’s got this cool little gadget capable of mapping tornadoes in a way they have not been mapped before or something and he needs Kate’s innate ability to sense which clouds are likely to become supercells. But Javi has an ulterior motive because his tornado-mapping business is bankrolled by a nasty evil cowboy banker who swoops in after a tornado hits a town and buys up people’s land, thus profiteering from their misery. So there’s that. But to spice things up, a competitive group of tornado-chasing Youtubers led by a handsome rancher Tyler (Glen Powell) turns up, as if only to make sure a romantic narrative could be established. And the group gets on with the task of driving around and trying not to get killed by tornadoes while explicitly attempting to get close to them, which is, I suppose, what cognitive dissonance would look like if it were to assume human form.  

But I’m not done yet either because the movie and the people putting it together obviously knew the rules of the nostalgia sequel game, or at least they made sure the iteration of NostalGPT they used to spit out the script for this calamity would be aware of them. So, the movie must equally mirror certain elements of the original and one-up them in some way. Therefore, in contrast to Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton who were happy enough to drive their Dorothy gizmo into the heart of the tornado and obtain a 3D image of what the vortex looked like, it’s no longer enough in 2024. Just understanding nature isn’t going to butter any parsnips now; therefore, Kate and Tyler have to figure out how to defeat a tornado using movie science, progressively longer trailers dragged behind their muscular pickup trucks and suspiciously large quantities of unspecified polymers they seem to have ready access to. And also, in contrast to how Helen Hunt’s character was driven to chase tornadoes because she witnessed her dad being whisked away by one when she was a kid, we need to see Kate’s entire gang of student friends get obliterated in the opening scene of the film. Again, it’s Hollywood, baby, so less is not more; more is more.  

Look, there’s no easy way to say this but between the main character being written as a tornado whisperer with supernatural powers, trucks coming out of nowhere on literally empty roads, evil cowboys cackling as they take people’s money, friends becoming foes and cocky rancheros with hearts of gold being subjected to what I can only imagine is Southern hospitality on steroids, and it all trying to cash on a few scenes you may or may not remember from the second-biggest movie of 1996, Twisters is just a bit too dumb to be allowed out unsupervised. 

And I don’t mind dumb movies either. What I do mind are dumb movies that do not know how to camouflage their dumbness with drama or interesting characters, which is where Twisters ultimately falters. Sure, it’s big, bloated and terminally stupid with its central premise of trying to find a cure for a tornado and then kill it like a weather-derived kaiju in a set piece that makes no sense otherwise and it would all be fine provided the filmmakers had given me someone to root for. But they didn’t. And I honestly have no idea how that happened because Joseph Kosinski knows how to (a) leverage nostalgia and (b) cash in on character development (see Top Gun: Maverick and Only the Brave for examples), Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy know how to work their Amblin magic, Mark L. Smith has written competent scripts before (The Revenant for instance) and Lee Isaac Chung has a specific knack for turning very simple human stories into gripping drama. And yet, with all this cognitive horsepower available, all these heads put together couldn’t think their way out of a paper bag and turned in Twisters, a movie that is so devoid of dramatic interest and character that its utter stupidity becomes so criminal that no amount of Glen Powell charm could be enough to rescue what was left of it.  

What a travesty. I suppose it only goes to show that it’s not enough to just subject whatever movie you’d like to industrialize into a nostalgia sequel franchise to a NostalGPT workflow because the data set you feed this beast needs to be of sound quality. And Twister just doesn’t have what it takes to spawn a sequel, it turns out. What comes out if you try and force the issue is a bunch of dead-eyed characters running from one corner of the frame to another while a CGI tornado does its thing, cars produce jump scares, cows fly in the air and people desperately hold onto pipes, which is a life hack that Bill Paxton’s character introduced to this universe in 1996. Look, people harp on AI coming to replace movies and spit in the face of that experimental rom-com with dead-eyed AI-creations standing in for actors but for all I care, the future is here and now and Twisters could just as well have been generated by an artificial intelligence algorithm and not put together with human-derived brainpower.  

Therefore, my verdict is as follows. Watch at your own peril and only if you are a Glen Powell completist. I stand disappointed and now I can only expect another sequel to come along, this time pre-trained on the Alien franchise, titled Twister³ and then quickly followed by Twister: Resurrection. Then, can we have a SuperCelleus nostalgia prequel with Guy Pearce in an old-man costume? At this point this series could not get any stupider.  

OK, I’m out.