The wind rises: "Twisters"

Hollywood's blowback summer continues. Twisters is a sequel we might have expected to see some time between 1997 and 1999, in the immediate wake of the $500m success of 1996's original Twister. That film - co-written by Michael Crichton, exec-produced by Steven Spielberg and directed by Speed's Jan de Bont - was one of Amblin's post-Jurassic blockbusters, designed to wow us anew with the growing sophistication of digital technology. (We can do T-rex scaled weather now.) It's been a while, then, but if there's one thing the studios know and know what to do with, it's hot air, and Twisters duly gives full, destructive physical shape and heft to what a film like the Fall Guy movie was constructed from and sold on. This being a 2024 variation, there is no inclination to pander to those adults who've abandoned the cinema in favour of the couch: the new film's stormchasers aren't the down-home grown-ups who populated the original (Helen Hunt, Bill Paxton, Alan Ruck, Jami Gertz), rather perky kids who barely look qualified to be operating a Bunsen burner. Representing Team Science (Magnus Pyke voice: science!): meteorologists Daisy Edgar-Jones and Anthony Ramos, striving to scan tornadoes using new, military-grade equipment, so as to predict their movements and mitigate against future destruction. Representing the thrillseekers among us: Glen Powell (a.k.a. Pin-Up Limmy) and his shit-eating grin, who rocks up in Storm Alley blasting "Ghost Riders in the Sky", aiming for hits on his YouTube channel much as the movie wants bums on seats.

Right through to the country-inflected Hot 100 contender plastered over the closing credits, that movie is a blockbuster built the way blockbusters used to be: pure formula, in its essence, but an abiding, pleasurable one, confidently executed and delivered. (If Twisters whips up a storm at the box office in the days ahead, we'll know why.) There's a high chance of town-trashing CGI, yes, but it never entirely wipes out the human interest; the script, credited to Mark L. Smith, has almost audibly been through multiple rewrites, and yet someone has preserved exactly the right level of workable summer-season nonsense. The headline news is the long-overdue return of expository science (science!), dumbing things down a little for the layperson in the cheap seats. Nothing here reaches the Dadaist heights of Aaron Eckhart in 2003's The Core, blowing a trumpet into a lump of granite to illustrate Some Principle or Another, but Ramos seizes upon the chance to teach Tornado Tracking 101 in a coffee shop using a glass of water and three pats of butter. It's maybe pushing it to then parallel tornado triangulation with developments among the central trio (sensible Daisy, cocky Glen, conflicted Anthony), no matter how much talk is thrown up about rising pressure and moisture in the air. But there's something quietly stirring in the vision of rival schools of American thought - the pros, clinging to their equipment, and the vibesurfers, going on intuition - coming to learn from one another. Carrying us beyond Kansas, and far from the political storm raging outside the multiplex door, here is a big studio movie that (doubtless with one eye on profit margins) seeks in its own small, goofy way to bridge the divisions in our society, to present good old boys and college-educated elite in an equally heroic light. That, surely, is the reason the phrase "climate change" is never once spoken: too contentious for some. Instead, Twisters takes a turn for the politically abstract, engineering a series of problems, bound at high velocity for red and blue states alike, which demand fixing through close cooperation.

Your director for the occasion is Lee Isaac Chung, who ports over much the same eye for the natural wonders of the American Midwest as he displayed in 2020's Oscar-nominated Minari. Twisters isn't a venture that cries out for an acclaimed humanist filmmaker, if truth be told, but Chung rolls up his sleeves, and plants his feet firmly in this territory, as if they were the retractible screws Powell uses to keep his ute upright in the middle of a Category 4 hurricane. He displays a fondness for every last player in his expansive ensemble (another golden-age blockbuster trait: there are fun one- or two-scene contributions from the likes of Maura Tierney, as Daisy's mom, and Paul Scheer as an airport parking jobsworth), and a Spielbergian way of amusing himself amid the maelstrom, and thereby amusing us. Clock the early scene that concludes with a pullback to reveal the ceiling fan rotating over our heroine: a domestic twister, a premonition of tumults to come. (I also enjoyed the super-cute Joe 90 glasses everybody now dons to combat flying debris, where Hunt, Paxton and co. presumably got through several million dollars' worth of Optrex.) Elements of repetition, at least early on, explain why we didn't get a sequel 25 years ago: there really are only so many ways anyone can shoot an off-road vehicle driving up to/away from an extreme weather front and keep it interesting. Like one of M. Night Shyamalan's infamous airbenders, Chung has to reroute his storms through a rodeo, a petrochemical plant, a little-league baseball fixture and finally the most evocative location of all so as to expand his field study and collect fresh data. In the end, it's still chiefly hot air, whistling at a high rate of knots between the ears, but it's been carefully shaped: it flows as it should for maximum viewer enjoyment. This is one of those projects you could well imagine the Hollywood of 2024 fumbling terribly. It feels a minor accomplishment that Twisters blows literally and frequently, but never figuratively.

Twisters is now showing in cinemas nationwide.