Bullet Points: Twisters (2024)

You can chalk this one up to a personal bias on my part because I’m a big Twister guy. I have vivid memories of when my buddy in high school got a wicked sound system at his parents house and we watched Twister with the volume and sub-woofer cranked up as high as it would go. Mouths were agape that day and I think it’s safe to say that we left that house as Twister fans and what some might call “big Helen Hunt guys”.

Having said that, Twisters has a lot to live up to for me. It’s not just another big and dumb summer film, it has shoes to fill. Those shoes are actually boots and those boots are covered in mud. The type of mud that gets thrown around during the Oklahoma storm season with a good country song playing in the background. Bonus points for this new chick in a drenched white tank top.

Synopsis: Kate Carter, a retired tornado-chaser and meteorologist, is persuaded to return to Oklahoma to work with a new team and new technologies.

• Young and full of hope: We get this opening full of young, attractive, scientist types chasing a tornado like they’re catching butterflies in a field. Wildly naïve and fully ready to save the world with their new invention, Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones), Javi (Anthony Ramos) and crew get a rude awakening when things don’t go quite as they had hoped. Talk about a real kick in the proverbial nuts.
• Broken: Kate, who is clearly the main character, retreats to a life behind a computer screen after their tragic day and languishes in the big city. She’s still working in the field but her passion has been sucked from her like a third grader with some Cherry flavored Gushers. It isn’t until her old pal Javi shows up with a business proposal that she finally decides to dust off her old khakis and take her 24 year old self back to scene of the crime.

• Back into the fray: To be honest, one of the things I disliked from the onset with this film was the character of Kate. She’s barely old enough to be working in the field and I’m supposed to believe she was doing some hardcore shit even five years earlier than this? C’mon, man! Either way, she takes Javi up on his job offer and does her best to not fuck everything up with her PTSD. That’s right! She’s totally got some issues that she hasn’t come to terms with neither Javi nor her mother or anyone else seems to care that she’s seen some shit in her short life.
• Hard to argue with that face: It isn’t long till Kate and Co. meet Youtuber Tyler (Glen Powell) and his misfit storm chasers. As much as I want to hate Glen Powell out of jealousy for his good looks and what he’s possibly done with Sydney Sweeney, I found myself enjoying his character just like it was written in the script. I can’t say the same for Kate as she goes from not trusting him, to accepting that he has some skills, to allowing him to sleep in her mom’s house. Things move fast when you’re constantly almost getting sucked 200 feet into the air by a pissed off Mother Nature. Still, I can’t blame her for getting sucked into the Tyler vortex and I definitely want that truck he drives.

• Shits gettin’ real: This isn’t a traditional action movie with gunfights and roundhouse kicks but there is plenty of action to go around. Car chases through the fields while shadowing raging storms and blasting rockets up the bunghole of 70 foot twisters will definitely get your heart racing. If anything, this just makes me want to do it even more! Unfortunately, the people who live in these towns aren’t lucky enough to have trucks that drill into the ground and they are in serious danger of becoming another statistic on The Weather Channel for your dad to see.
• Professionals: Without spoiling the film, (you’re welcome) Director Lee Isaac Chung had a real opportunity to end this story just like you would expect. Many of the characters are pure stereotypes and whatever you may think of that it does give us a chance to focus more on the two or three main characters. That’s a good thing in my book since this could have easily turned into some ensemble team story and I think it works much better as a journey for Daisy Edgar-Jones’ character. Most movies would have gone the easy route and turned this into your average tornado-rom-com.

The Verdict: I had a very surprising amount of fun watching Twisters. My expectations were low and I was very ready in those first 10 minutes or so to write this one off and hate on it forever. An interesting thing happened, however, when the film leaned heavily into what made the original great without turning this into some shit CW teen angst movie. It felt like a few of the characters were being set up to share the title of “Person I would least likely save from a Twister”, but it quickly flipped the script and I started to like them in spite of all of the hate that normally fuels me. If you’re a fan of the original (like me), then you should give this a try because it really did put a big Oklahoma grin on my face.