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| Images courtesy of Universal Pictures |
The summer blockbuster movie season kicks in with high winds with this week's release of Twisters, a long-awaited sequel (of sorts) to the 1996 Jan De Bont disaster vehicle, Twister.
In '96, De Bont's tale of tornado chasers started a massive trend reintroducing the masses to spectacle films about humans battling mother nature against the odds. After decades, the disaster movie once again become a mainstay in cinema, bringing about the release of Volcano, Dante's Peak, Armageddon, Deep Impact and various others of varying quality.
With almost zero connection to the original film that featured Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt, this is one of those sequels that really copies the first film beat for beat. This is a highly unoriginal part two that despite its nearly flawless visuals is just a copycat that features more updated technology and a bit more character development than the first.
When lead character Kate Carter (Daisy Edgar-Jones) loses most of her independent science team in a catastrophic incident, she abandons her position as a lead tornado chaser and heads to the city. With all her talents in check, she begins working for a meteorology company. Years later, she's pulled back into the fold by one of her former surviving team members. Like clockwork, things go sideways and Kate is sucked (pun intended) back into the world she thought she had abandoned forever.
The story here is a straight retread. We have multiple teams that are following tornadoes in hopes of the ultimate adrenaline rush and gaining insight into how they work and possibly saving lives. The plot ends up devolving into one about corporate greed and its effects on the people of the small towns that are ravaged by these storms. While it's a fully watchable summer popcorn flick, it just plays it a little to close to its predecessor and has nothing new or original to say. However, the storm effects, despite a few poorly rendered scenes, are a visual spectacle. And the sound design, much like the first, is something to behold.
Yet there's no real soundtrack to speak of. The Van Halen track Humans Being became a massive hit around the release of Twister. This flick has nothing like that. Where legacy sequels like Top Gun: Maverick used nostalgia to captivate with repeated musical themes and classic soundtrack songs, Twisters is mostly barren. Director Lee Isaac Chung does a phenomenal job creating edge of your seat moments of tension during the storms and his grasp of pure destruction is apparent, but the lack of any type of continuity in the music department seemed to be a dire mistake.
This is one of those mid-summer movie season blockbusters that you just have to go into with your mind turned off. Some of the decisions these characters make are absolutely vacant of any thought process. The science is based on nothing. And the repeated tropes become distracting at times. There are many scenes that are straight rips from Twister. They need to stop thinking audiences are only comfortable when their nostalgia is served up with no originality whatsoever.
With some better writing and some dedication to crafting something a bit more diverse in the story department, this could have been much a far greater movie than it turned out to be. It's not that it's bad. It's just not that good. Chung's reliance on De Bont's movie is a distraction. With two fairly charismatic leads in Powell and Edgar-Jones, there could have been so much more to this. And the obvious lead in to another sequel feels forced.
-CG