MOVIE REVIEW – Compared to Jan de Bont’s beloved original, this long-gap sequel barely kicks up dust. Despite the advancements in visual effects, the film fails to match the tension and spectacle of its predecessor. The characters are shallow, and the plot is more flat than captivating. The new direction lacks the energy and excitement of the original, leaving audiences less than satisfied with this sequel.

Jan de Bont’s Twister remains one of the most beloved blockbusters of the 1990s, at least for those who grew up with it. That’s largely due to its still-impressive special effects, crafted at a time when filmmakers were thrilled to experiment with the newfound possibilities of CGI. Each storm was meticulously designed and impressively tangible, living up to the film’s tagline: “It’ll blow you away.” So why, in an even more advanced cinematic landscape where any phenomenon can be easily created with the click of a mouse, does Lee Isaac Chung’s long-gap sequel, Twisters, barely kick up dust?

Twisters lacks any real narrative connection to the original beyond featuring the storm-tracking device nicknamed Dorothy. Our protagonists are reminiscent of Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton’s characters from Twister, only slightly modified to suggest some variation. Kate Cooper (Daisy Edgar-Jones), a meteorologist and former storm chaser still haunted by a tragedy in the field, is reluctantly recruited by her old friend Javi (Anthony Ramos) to work for his sleek, dubiously corporate-backed organization. Her counterpart is Tyler Owens (Glen Powell), a self-proclaimed “tornado wrangler” who eagerly drives into as many storms as possible with his ragtag crew, aiming to generate likes on his popular YouTube channel—the film’s one conspicuous attempt to update the scenario for modern times.

Modern Heroes or Clichés?

Almost immediately and predictably, a tense, flirty rivalry develops between Tyler and Kate, with both making misguided assumptions about each other. Tyler thinks Kate is a stiff “city girl” sell-out, while Kate sees Tyler as a reckless buffoon only in it for the fame. Given that this central relationship barely evolves beyond stock emotional beats, no one will claim that Twisters stands alongside Chung’s previous, significantly quieter character-driven works like Munyurangabo and Minari.

Character depth was hardly the point of Twister, but de Bont was at least blessed with a dynamic cast that breathed life into even the hoariest of stereotypes. Here, Powell’s charms fall flat, constantly posing with his ripped physique and wearing cowboy attire like a model in a Midwest fashion shoot. Meanwhile, Daisy Edgar-Jones mostly stares blankly ahead, ostensibly to suggest deeper emotional layers.

Storms or Spectacular Failures?

Of course, the tornadoes are the main attraction here. But while Chung demonstrated his familiarity with Tornado Alley in his semi-autobiographical Minari, the brief storm sequence in that film feels more authentically tense than any of the chaos in Twisters. Sure, the tornadoes are loud, destructive, and plentiful, but where de Bont favored rigorous and painterly visuals that emphasized clear spatial dynamics and allowed the twisters to steadily creep up on our heroes like horror-movie monsters, Chung’s aesthetic is all arbitrary handheld camerawork combined with a chaotic mess of CGI sludge that consistently makes it hard to tell where anyone or anything is at any given moment.

This slapdash nature is indicative of Twisters as a whole, which continues as a jumble of poorly sketched backstories and subplots, half-hearted topical references (such as the climate crisis quickly mentioned as a reason for the rise in dangerous tornado activity), and tepid fan service (a sequence set in a movie theater pales in comparison to the tornado ripping through the drive-in screen in the original). Even the finale, where a monster tornado bears down on a small town, feels strangely undercooked, like the last item on a to-do list being checked off for how little it inspires the terrifying awe of the original’s climactic F5.

-Gergely Herpai “BadSector”-