In Light of Everything That's Happening Now, Who the Hell Cares What I Thought of Twisters?

Seriously though

About an hour ago, Joe Biden pulled an LBJ and dropped out of a presidential race it was becoming increasingly apparent that he could not win. This was not entirely unprecedented since Lyndon Baines Johnson also dropped out of the race despite his landslide victory over Barry Goldwater in 1964. 

It is, nevertheless, extremely notable and newsworthy. The same is true of the unsuccessful attempt on Donald Trump’s life. Yet I once again feel like I am living inside a savage satire full of bizarre, preposterous developments and insane subplots. 

The world is on fire. We are in danger. Consequently, who the fuck cares what I think of Twisters? Obviously, the kind souls who voted for Twisters over Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F care must have cared at least a little, or they would not have taken the time to press a button to determine my fate, but what I do professionally feels particularly irrelevant now.

That is particularly true when I am writing about pop culture that fundamentally does not matter, that almost couldn’t be less important or essential. That’s Twisters. I really wanted to see the movie in RPX, an incredibly stupid format where the screen is bigger than usual and your chair vibrates whenever there’s action. 

That’s generally a recipe for disappointment, but there are a lot of action setpieces in Twisters, so my butt would have been vibrating pleasantly for damn near two solid hours. 

The timing didn’t work out, however, so I ended up watching it on a boring old screen in a seat that didn’t do jack shit to improve my viewing experience. 

The only reason I know I’ve seen Twister is that I wrote a massive article about every film Phillip Seymour Hoffman made for The Dissolve. 

All I remember about Twister is that it has one of Hoffman’s worst performances. Greatness was Hoffman’s default mode. He’s even hilarious in Along Came Polly, but Hoffman’s artistry, unfortunately, couldn’t make his character in Twister anything other than a braying, obnoxious jackass. 

I have no love for Twister. I’ve mostly forgotten it in the same way that I have already mostly forgotten Twisters. 

The reboot that someone, somewhere, must have been hankering for opens with an exciting setpiece in which college student Kate Carter (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and her colleagues try to defeat a tornado by launching barrels of Sodium polyacrylate into it. 

It does not succeed, and two of her friends die horrible deaths. 

After a Bratz: The Movie-style five-year time jump, a humbled Kate is a government bureaucrat who accepts an offer from an old friend to help test a newfangled tornado scanning system. 

Twisters’ opening setpiece ends up being too scary and satisfying. Since she lost two of her friends and just barely escaped an agonizing death herself, Kate spends the rest of the movie in a thick fog of grief, despair, and mourning. 

That’s understandable given her past, but a silly popcorn movie like Twisters does not benefit from a funereal tone and emphasis on the ever-present, ever-looming specter of violent, premature death. 

Twisters is perversely grim and strangely humorless until the introduction of Glen Powell about twenty minutes in as flashy YouTube “tornado wrangler” Tyler Owens. 

Where Kate chases tornados as a strange, counter-intuitive way of dealing with her grief and guilt over her friends’ death, Tyler chases tornados because it’s fun. 

Tyler is all about fun. He races through life with a million-dollar smile on his face and all the confidence in the world. 

This is the first film I’ve seen that Glen Powell has starred in. Powell attained instant superstardom by stealing Top Gun: Maverick from Tom Cruise. 

Since then, Powell has starred in 80 percent of all new movies. He’s ubiquitous! You’d have to move to a cave on the moon to avoid the guy. 

Why was this previously unknown actor suddenly in everything? It's probably because he is handsome, charismatic, funny, likable, and sexy as hell. 

He’s a goddamn movie star, is what he is. A weirdly grim downer about how bad weather will take the people you love most and leave you with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder becomes a fun adventure comedy about a flamboyant wildman risking seemingly certain death for the sake of the thrill and views. 

Twisters is consequently like the old McDLT. Just as the McDLT separated the hot and warm components of an upscale McDonald’s hamburger, Twisters segregates the hot side, which is Glen Powell being tons of fun playing a massive goofball, from the cold side, which is Kate living forever in that horrible moment when a tornado sent her closest companions hurling hundreds of feet in the air to horrific deaths. 

When Glen Powell is onscreen radiating nuclear levels of charm and sex appeal, Twisters is dumb fun that doesn’t take itself, or anything else, too seriously. When Powell is NOT onscreen, however, Twisters is no damn fun at all and takes itself way too seriously. 

It is, consequently, a movie divided against itself. Kate’s dreary character arc keeps dragging Tyler down. It does not help that her colleagues are like her—serious and boring—while the people who collaborate with Tyler are colorful party animals who live to have fun. 

I had massive cognitive dissonance throughout Twisters. During every setpiece involving a twister (or two twisters; we got twainnns!) I found myself thinking about how the characters would have died ten to fifteen times during every tornado in real life, yet they overwhelmingly make it to the end credits alive and in one piece. 

Twisters is a sequel/reboot that pluralizes the name of the film it’s following. Other films like this include Aliens, The Magnificent Ambersons, and, of course, Citizen Kanes, which famously took place in a multiverse chockablock with Charles Foster Kanes, each more tragic and undone by hubris than the last. 

I enjoyed a little under half of Twisters. That, of course, would be the fun half with Powell. I was super bored, however, by the other half. If they make a sequel to Twisters, my advice would be to lean in on the fun and maybe trim the tragic psychodrama just a little. 

But honestly, who fucking cares? We as a species may not have much of a future, but that, ultimately, does not have anything to do with Twisters. 

Two and a half stars out of five