Movie Review: 'Twisters' Starring Glenn Powell

Twisters (2024)

Directed by Lee Isaac Chung

Written by Mark L. Smith

Starring Glenn Powell, Daisy Edgar Jones, Anthony Ramos, Maura Tierney

Release Date Friday, July 19th, 2024

Published Friday July 19th, 2024

“You don’t face your fears, you ride’em.”

What does that mean? I’m being pedantic, I know, but this line clangs like a basketball on the rim bouncing errantly away from a score. It’s a bum note in a symphonic performance, like an out of tune instrument. How do you ride your fears without facing them? The context of the scene is Glenn Powell’s Tyler Owens explaining to Daisy Edgar Jones’ Kate that he gave up bull-riding to pursue meteorology. He had to face the bull first in order to ride it. You can’t get on a bull backwards. I’m being intentionally thick, I just hate this movie and that line specifically.

Twisters stars Daisy Edgar Jones as Kate Carter. Kate was a grad student who, with the help of a team, had developed a way that she believed might be able to tame a tornado. Through the use of a super-polymer, she theorizes that you can suck the moisture out of a tornado, essentially strangling the tornado, rendering it less destructive. Her first test of this theory, unfortunately, goes horribly wrong. Three members of her team, including her boyfriend and her closest friend, are killed. Kate leaves the field and takes a desk job with the National Weather Service.

Five years later, Javi (Anthony Ramos), the only other living member of Kate’s team, approaches her with a new idea. He’s developing a military grade experiment that may be able to map a tornado. This may serve the purpose of determining how destructive a tornado may be before it strikes. Javi needs Kate’s help as she has an almost superhuman ability to determine where a tornado is going to touch down. If she can find the tornados, Javi’s crew, including future Superman star David Corenswet, will be able to map and possibly save lives.

Meanwhile, as they are chasing for science, a hot dog YouTuber named Tyler Owens is chasing celebrity status. With his storm chasing YouTube channel, good looks, and loyal team of weather daredevils, Tyler drives into the tornados, risking his life, and the life of anyone with him, for the chance to increase YouTube ad revenue. Oh, and sell t-shirts that say ‘This isn’t my first Tornado’ which feature him riding his truck like a bucking bronco. Never mind that tornadoes devastate communities and can have an actual body count, YouTube baby!

Tyler sounds like the villain in my description but it’s actually Javi. As we will learn, the funding for his project comes from an evil real estate magnate who likes to swoop into devastated communities pretending to care and then buy their land for next to nothing. When Kate finds out about the scheme Javi is involved in, she leaves, and will, eventually, join up with Tyler who reveals himself to be a secret meteorologist who cares just as much about fame as he does about those devastated communities.

When Kate tells Tyler about her failed experiment, the two begin to work together to fix her results. When they come up with a model that might actually work, Tyler puts aside YouTube fame and dedicates himself and his team of wildcat tornado wranglers to helping Kate tame a tornado. Naturally, this will put her at odds with Javi who will have to wrestle with his desire for riches and the desire to save lives by slowing down tornadoes.

The script for Twisters is the biggest issue. The script makes Powell’s Tyler and the team of supporting players so obnoxious in the opening act that, when it’s time for them to become the heroes, they engender a dissociation. I don’t like these characters but the movie is treating them like heroes. They are also acting heroically. eventually, in a way that is at odds with the selfish, boorish, narcissistic way they were portrayed before. Which version of these characters is the real one? Powell tries to smooth over this dissociation with movie star magnetism but the movie isn’t good enough around him for him to succeed in that task.

Everything in Twisters is technically impressive, the tornadoes look and feel real. The sound design is epic. That said, the film is far too ethically dubious for that to matter in any way. The makers of Twisters want to have it both ways. They want to treat tornadoes like action movie monsters and play at being humble about the real life ways tornadoes devastate lives and communities. Just last week, the filmmakers made headlines when they admitted that the movie doesn’t mention climate change. This goes beyond ethically dubious into the realm of evil. A movie about the growing extremity of tornadoes that doesn’t mention how man made climate change is causing larger and larger weather extremes is at best corporate propaganda. It’s also desperately weak willed and cowardly.

As I mentioned, I hate Twisters. It’s a genetically engineered blockbuster. It’s I.P based claptrap aimed at our nostalgia for a movie that genuinely respected the destructive nature of tornadoes while respectively reaping action movie thrills from them. Twister, at the base level, didn’t feature characters who were only in it for the thrill. Both the good and bad characters of Twister were still in it for the science and the chance to save lives by mapping a tornado with modern technology. Twisters merely references Twister and contains none of its heart. Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt may have been characters out of a rom-com with their squabbling, will-they-won’t-they get back together dynamic, but there was nothing icky about Twister.

The ick is all over Twisters. This is an empty, joyless, soulless exercise in action movie claptrap. That it is exploiting something, the destruction of the climate leading to more and more dangerous weather, makes it all the more insidious and stench-ridden. This movie stinks of corporate greed and cowardice. Just because Glenn Powell has dimples doesn’t mean his movie isn’t an ethically dubious exercise in minimizing real-life tragedy while exploiting that tragedy for profit. Twisters is exactly the kind of movie you get when Hedge Fund managers become movie studio executives.

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