Review by Tim Robins
Twisters (2024) is one of the most obnoxious films I have ever watched. The film may be doing gangbusters at the American box office, hitting $123 million globally last weekend, but it’s uncritical nostalgia for “good ol’ boys” and the good ol’ days left this Brit feeling decidedly queasy. Think The Dukes of Hazard, but with really bad weather.
The film is an unasked-for sequel to Twister (1996) itself part of a 1990’s revival in disaster movies, which also included Dante’s Peak, (1997), Volcano (1997) and Armageddon (1998). Twister was a box office smash, having the sixth biggest US opening to that point in time and, over twelve days, surpassing the revenue from The Empire Strikes Back.
Twister had a fun cast, offering exciting if implausible action, all with a SciFi undercurrent, thanks to co-writer Michael Creighton. The film was another of Crighton’s plots that gathers a group of people together and throws them into a life-threatening situation, just like The Andromeda Strain (1971), Jurassic Park(1993), and Sphere (1998).
The original film was, at best, throwaway fun. Executive Producer Stephen Spielberg attributed the film’s success to its special effects and the film is probably best remembered for a scene in which an airborne cow is swept past the car of a couple of tornado chasers (Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton). But Twisters is another story.
The film begins with storm chaser Kate Carter and her crew setting out to tame a tornado. Straight away, I was turned off by the obvious plotting and an unbearably excitable group of scientists. Sadly, British actress Daisy Edgar-Jones, as Kate Carder ,fits right in with the air-punching and whooping. It was like going on a road trip with people you picked up in a bar. No matter, they are all too predictably heading for disaster and a time jump to “five years later”.
We meet Carter working at NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) when Javi (Anthony Ramos), a former friend, colleague and fellow survivor invites Carter to join him on a mission to create real-time, 3D images of tornadoes in Oklahoma. There, Carter locks horns with a YouTuber and self-proclaimed “Tornado Wrangler”, the immaculately groomed but down and gritty Tyler Owens (Glen Powell). Love soon blossoms in Tornado Alley as Carter reconnects with the US heartland that used to be her home.
What I was unprepared for was a very American pastoralism hidden behind a whirlwind of Hollywood tropes. Literary critic Leo Marx, in his foundational work ‘The Machine in the Garden’, sees this pastoralism as emerging from America’s shift from a predominantly rural society to an industrialised world, marked by technology’s incursion into a rural landscape that was imagined to represent God’s good graces.
For a variety of reasons, Marx examines the role of the rural in the works of Herman Mellville and Washington Irving, but pastoralism is alive and well in a TV series such as Superman and Lois and it lies, barely hidden, in Twisters – which is relentlessly conservative.
The story rests on the same juxtaposition of city with rural life present in Superman and Lois. We find Carter working for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in New York. The city is no place for a woman and her living and working there is a symptom of Carter’s deep trauma. (Indeed, Marx argues that it is the function of pastoralism to heal, or rather mask, such trauma).
Just as Carter extols the virtues of New York life to Jev, she is nearly run over by an intemperate driver as she crosses the road. The city’s juxtaposition with the authentic country values are carried through every facet of the script. Jav is mocked for his city slicker hair style and New York is portrayed as out of touch with the raw, and sexual forces of nature as it never experiences tornadoes. (It does experience hurricanes but that’s for a different movie).
The deeply conservative nature of Twisters’ story is revealed in the representation of Carter. She is bright, but not too bright – we learn she didn’t complete her Phd and is , instead, valued for her “intuition”. Carter doesn’t really need any of the available technology to track a twister, she just uses a dandelion.
A child of nature, in a creepy conversation between Owens and Carter’s mother, we are invited to imagine her as a naked child standing in a field of wheat and facing a thunderstorm – standing alone. Eventually, we come to see that Carter is the Tornado that Owens needs to wrangle.
Carter is struggling to overcome the emotional impact of a rogue storm that carried off her team, including her boyfriend. Yes, Carter is that saddest of all women – one who has lost her man. But fear not, she is soon offered not one but two potential replacements to fill the void in her life: fellow survivor Javi and YouTuber Owens, a rowdy, roughneck hunk who is a secret science buff.
Owens fulfils everything Carter has lost. He’s cleverer than she is and can reassure her that her field work was on the right track. But Owens’ main function is to re-introduce Carter to the authenticities of country life – including a rodeo and the lovin’ of a good man.
This might have been tolerable, if Glenn Powell had an ounce of charisma rather than the bland looks best fit for TV movies or the covers of romantic fiction.
Apart from ‘intuition’, what Carter brings to those around her is ‘heart’. The echoes of Twisters’ science fictionalish origins are to be found in the juxtaposition of rational, objective decision making and Carter’s emotional response to the victims of the tornados. The film suggests it is Carter’s role to bring humanity to the mechanical realm of scientific research. It is the traditional role of women to represent the heart rather than the head, just as Carter’s mother represents the heart of America’s heartland.
Furthering the conservative cause, Carter and Owens are a desperately “white bread” couple. (Don’t be fooled by the extensively diverse cast that surrounds them. They are mostly tornado fodder, or to be rescued by the whites or to step aside to let a white man see his blonde prize).
It is not that Twisters is without any pleasure. There are a couple set pieces, although one of them, a rodeo, begins with nationalistic flag waving that is common in America. A scene where a tornado approaches an unsuspecting town is made ludicrous by the sight of Carter & Co running down the street shouting “get inside!”. In the event, Owens and crew hide in a cinema which does afford the film a moment of wry humour as the cinema’s screen is ripped away to turn the chaos outside into a deadly spectacle.
But for all the harking back to an ‘innocent’ time of 1990s’ disaster movies (Twister preceded films such as Volcano and Armageddon) it is not nostalgic enough for the height of the genre in the 1970s. This oversight is no more apparent in Twisters’ failure to address the role of global warming in the creation of more powerful tornadoes and the extension of Tornado Alley further north.
If Twisters had been made in the 1970s, you can bet the role of global warming would have been addressed directly. The behind-the-scenes villain, here a land grabbing carpetbagger, would own a polluting petrochemical plant and would have paid for his ignorance by having his burning body swept into the sky as a tornado swept through his plant.
Back in The Seventies, the film probably wouldn’t have focussed only on the menace the weather posed to American life. Instead, the central character would have been traumatised by witnessing first hand a hurricane destroy a pacific island community and spelt out the connection between warming seas and the increased intensity of all kinds of storm. But, sadly, Twisters has neither the characters or the city smarts to do any of that. It is too busy shoving a big old slice of apple pie down the audience’s throats.
Superficially, it’s easy to sit back and enjoy what many critics are calling nostalgic fun, that nostalgia being for a simpler form of film aimed at all the family. There’s no swearing, and none of the ironic humour and self-conscious reflexivity that have defined the MCU. And forget all that complex continuity stuff, Twistersproudly stands alone.
But Twisters isn’t just nostalgia, it is a screen memory papering over the current cracks in the American psyche as the country tears itself apart more than any force of nature.
Tim Robins
Twisters is in cinemas now | Official Site: twistersmovie.ca
• Twisters: The Album is available from AmazonUK (Affiliate Link)
- About the Author
- Latest Posts
A freelance journalist and Doctor Who fanzine editor since 1978, Tim Robins has written on comics, films, books and TV programmes for a wide range of publications including Starburst, Interzone, Primetime and TV Guide.
His brief flirtation with comics includes ghost inking a 2000AD strip and co-writing a Doctor Who strip with Mike Collins. Since 1990 he worked at the University of Glamorgan where he was a Senior Lecturer in Cultural and Media Studies and the social sciences. Academically, he has published on the animation industry in Wales and approaches to social memory. He claims to be a card carrying member of the Politically Correct, a secret cadre bent on ruling the entire world and all human thought.
Categories: Features, Film, Other Worlds, Reviews
In Review: Nosferatu (2024) 
In Review: Kraven the Hunter 
In Review: Conclave (2024) 
In Review: Gladiator II