Twisters (Chung, 2024)

Twisters was not a poorly made film from a spectacle perspective, but I found it repetitive and, hence, boring. There are five or six set pieces of the characters chasing a storm or getting caught in one, and they are mostly interchangeable. You could run the film backward (like Memento) and I don’t know that it would hurt the narrative that much. You could chop up the scenes and play them in random order (like the documentary Eno) and I don’t think it would change the viewing experience at all. Also, despite perfunctory attempts to distinguish legitimate motives for weather research from thrill-seeking, the film had a queasy sheen around it, with realistic depictions of the aftermath of storms and the havoc they cause at odds with the “ain’t this fun” tone of the whole.

The main character, Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones), has wanted from grade school to experiment with how to stop tornadoes. She is also supposed to be one of those savants who instinctively reads the sky and wind and knows what will happen. But she had a bad experience and swore off “chasing” until a former friend reminds her that the data gathered could help people. But then she has another bad experience and swears off chasing until a new acquaintance convinces her to go back to the idea of researching with the ultimate goal of preventing rather than studying. This sort of “get back on the horse” internal conflict is what passes, minimally, for character development, and it, too, is repetitive.

For all the alleged trauma that the characters are carrying around about others getting hurt, it was surprising that, at a key moment, one of the main characters kicks another out of a vehicle on the cusp of a storm and drives off. I guess because the other character has demonstrated he is evil, openly declaring that he doesn’t care about “people” that it is okay to endanger him. Or maybe we are meant to infer that, while unpredictable, Twisters are predictable enough that in this instance the villain was in no real danger.

There are ideas at the fringes of the film that never really develop — a land investor who buys up destroyed property from the underinsured; an embedded journalist who gives the thrill seekers the attention they want; a band justifying profiting from reckless behavior by giving a portion of their profits to disaster victims. But like the weather fronts in the film that fail to generate enough momentum to become storms, these plot points drip and drizzle between the money scenes.

And those scenes are…fine. For a while. After a while they are more numbing than inspiring. The closest approximation I can make for my viewing experience is Transformers 2 or maybe the last forty minutes of some B-character Marvel movie. Clap. Boom. Pow! Repeat. I couldn’t remember the name of a singe character (even though I typed one two paragraphs ago). One is from Arkansas, which makes him a hillbilly…or not. One is called “city girl” even though she is not. Maybe there is a subtle Pride and Prejudice homage going on here…don’t get carried away by first impressions. Come to think about it, Sense and Sensibility has a major plot point about the heroine almost dying from getting caught in a storm, doesn’t it? Running to IMDB to see if Edgar-Jones’s character is named Bennet or Dashwood…nope. Oh well, I tried. Cue more lightning and thunder.