Twisters (2024)
Rowdy male tornado wrangler and cool woman scientist get tangled in the updrafts
Tyler (Glen Powell) and Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones) studying threatening skies and each other
Twisters (2024)
In theaters
Tornadoes are meteorological monsters, terrifying yet mesmerizing. They exert a powerful visual pull in this thrilling movie. The violent funnels touching down from the sky, wriggling across the landscape like malevolent live things, had me gripping my seat.
Thankfully, the movie’s science helped steady my nerves. The script’s rational reckoning with nature’s ferocity begins some five years ago in Oklahoma, one of the epicenters along “Tornado Alley”.
Oklahoma native Kate Carter (Daisy Edgar-Jones) has possessed from childhood a propensity for “sniffing weather” (professional tornado-watchers acknowledge that some people indeed have such a gift).
She’s also a smart university meteorology student who’s teamed up with three fellow student “storm chasers” to boldly face twisters when everyone else is fleeing them. They load computerized gear into a couple of speeding vans and drive straight toward a tornado to scientifically determine the path it’s about to take.
But as the team chases one burgeoning storm, a panicked Kate – reverting to her “sniffing” instinct? – misreads the instruments and guesses wrong about the tornado’s path. After their trapped vehicle is whipped around in the wind and rain, forcing them to abandon it, three of her companions die in the howling downpour.
Devastated, Kate escapes to New York, working for the next five years as a TV meteorologist. That’s when the other survivor of the disaster, Javi (Anthony Ramos), shows up and persuades her to return to Oklahoma.
He’s secured ample financing for new high-end computers and powerful SUVs. He promises Kate they’ll be able to track tornadoes with much greater accuracy.
Kate reluctantly agrees, and, back in her home state, finds that storm chasing has taken on a whole new media-driven frenzy. The roadways are packed with vehicles carrying thrill seekers frantic to snuggle up to the beastly storms. Vastly improved televised weather forecasting makes their idiotic risk-taking absurdly easy.
And exploitable. Exhibit A: storm-chasing’s rockstar, Tyler Owens (Glen Powell). He’s a swaggering, grinning tempter of fate who wrangles storms not to study them but to stream their darts and swirls live on his YouTube channel. His more than one million subscribers can’t get enough.
Tyler counseling his adoring YouTube fans on tornado wrangling: “If you feel it, chase it”
Meteorological Ph.D.s be damned, Tyler proclaims, he’s in the game for the action, broadcasting his chiseled jawline and killer smile to his Internet fan base right alongside live tornado footage. He’s got the voltage people want. Life-destroying, property-demolishing tornadoes are a catchy extra added attraction.
His arrogance is rewarded on the ground by legions of his followers racing in vehicles to join the tornado hunt just for a chance to ogle Tyler. The mantra he gets the crowds to chant: “You don't face your fears, you ride them.”
Which is enough to keep his tribal following clogging the roadways, blocking and infuriating scientists like Kate, Javi and their team.
Powell is the picture’s centrifugal force. Both the industry and audiences are a little starved right now for the kind of twinkling, weaponless, non-threatening macho that Burt Reynolds oozed, and Powell seems to promise.
It’s hardly surprising that Kate and Tyler clash like colliding storms. One bright morning, claiming she’s merely reading the skies, Kate points Tyler and his crew west to follow a developing storm. That’s a decoy maneuver, since she’s “sniffed” that it’s actually going east, and her team beats Tyler’s to the prize.
Not to be hornswoggled a second time, Tyler promises to follow Kate’s team toward a looming storm, only to speed past them and start airing footage before Kate and company can even set up their equipment.
Could the dedicated scientist and the media glamor boy join forces? Unsurprisingly, they do. Tyler invites himself to visit Kate and her mother for dinner, and the feuding pair get comfortable and rethink Kate’s data.
Maybe she needs to refine her science. There’s no way to know except to try a new approach, which leads to the movie’s hair-raising climax.
Kate, Javi and Tyler summon the courage to face their fears and their final storm together
This thin “romantic” plot has a lot of high-energy storm scenes to haul, and it’s not as electric as those towering, lightning-bolt twisters. Kate and Tyler never even kiss, which is fair enough, since they’re only getting to know one another.
But their shyness isn’t just a story-telling tease. It leaves the audience to fantasize, right over Kate’s rational head, about the galvanizing Tyler, and director Lee Isaac Chung and cinematographer Dan Mindel keep the camera swooning over Powell’s seductively lifted eyebrows and gliding cowboy hips.
Calculatedly, sex between Tyler and Kate never happens. Because it might rattle the tantalizing, just-out-of-reach impression the movie wants to create of Powell as a movie star, the birth of a future mega box-office draw we might as well latch onto now.
Powell is the picture’s centrifugal force, not tornadoes or moist-eyed Kate. To be sure, Edgar-Jones, who had an assured emotional depth in Where the Crawdads Sing (2022), is pleasurable to watch here.
As Kate she’s sensitive to tornado victims, and at the same time a force to be reckoned with in the real-world science of storm-watching (the number of tornadoes has rapidly increased in recent decades).
And deft as Kate is at dodging Tyler’s not so sly come-ons, her reluctance to fall for him is the movie’s ploy to set us and the industry up to be roped in by this winking hellion.
Industry insiders may be going a bit overboard. I don’t know if it’s more accurate to say they’re doing it too late or too early. I wonder because Powell’s not 25. He’s 35. A hunky 35, I’ll grant. He’s engaging, but not as cheeky and watchable as the cocky Burt Reynolds was at the same age.
Both the industry and audiences are a little starved right now for the kind of twinkling, weaponless, non-threatening macho that Reynolds oozed, and Powell seems to promise.
We need to watch the horizon. Meanwhile, it’s a boon for audiences that Twisters is sturdily and excitingly enough made to warrant being seen on the big screen, and Powell’s appeal may just be getting started. Forecast: disturbances in the field can’t be ruled out.