'Twisters' review: well, I saw it

"People want to be told what to do so badly that they'll listen to anyone" - Donald Draper

Twisters, the sequel to the 1996 “classic” Twister (i.e. the second film in the Severe Weather Extended Universe {SWEU}), is a movie about releasing diaper particles into tornadoes to absorb the water. As the film opens, the meteorologist and protagonist Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones, whom I think is extremely untalented) stands on a hilltop and communes spiritually with wind/  Then we learn about the diaper particles, and then Sally Draper gets sucked up into the tornado and dies.

You might be able to guess—I didn’t much like this movie. The second film from director Lee Isaac Chung of Minari fame, another movie I thought was a bit overrated,¹ has no particularly interesting images. One could argue that it has no images at all (and you could similarly argue that Edgar-Jones has no face). Like, is anyone, even the fans of this movie, going to push back on that? The tornadoes look so boring. I’m supposed to be scared of that gray-blue blob that is indiscernible from the sky?

The film is fine, ultimately. The action sequences do hit, despite, as previously mentioned, being poorly directed. The ludicrous, awful script had me by turns scoffing, yawning, and laughing (not at jokes). Edgar-Jones is such an unserious performer that Glen Powell just steamrolls her with his charisma as the film’s leading man “Tyler,” a severe weather YouTube influencer.

At first, Kate thinks Tyler is the villain but soon learns that he is a communist cowboy who actually helps disaster victims. She realizes that she’s working in real estate disguised as science! Thus, communism defeats capitalism once and for all in the final act of Twisters… Kind of interesting but poorly handled. Then, they fall in love but do not kiss (unforgivable; I know everyone is blaming Spielberg for this but it’s Chung’s name on the movie, so it’s his fault that’s how it works).

If you wanted to dig in on the “themes of Twisters” more in depth, you could also discuss how Kate’s realization that she works for the man and Tyler works for the people a metaphor for thinking the internet is the enemy of Hollywood but realizing that Hollywood might be the bad guy, suffocating independent cinema. I don’t actually want to dig in, but you could if you felt like it.

Lately, I’ve been “on one” about the summer’s big budget movies. I keep snapping at loved ones who want to tell me that Deadpool or Twisters or whatever is actually good. I don’t agree! I won’t agree! They are consumer products like ketchup and tires to me!

These loved ones always say things to me like “you don’t like populist cinema” which couldn’t be farther than the truth; I don’t like bad cinema, which many populist movies are. But not all of them are! Most of my favorite movies of all time are major Hollywood studio productions: Sunset Blvd., Do the Right Thing, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, GoodFellas, Titanic… All of these movies were financed and released by major Hollywood motion picture studios with the express purpose of making a ton of money, and just because they are good (and old), that doesn’t change the fact of their intent.

They are also auteur pictures, yes (though the Universal Pictures marketing department would have you believe that Twisters is as well because Chung is from Arkansas). In today’s critical landscape, the concept of an “auteur picture” has been twisted by bad writers at major publications like Vanity Fair, etc. to say that populism and directorial intent cannot exist in the same movie. Further, these same critics say this director or that director isn’t an auteur because they don’t write their own scripts. Both of these concepts are founding characteristics of auteur theory! So what are any of you talking about?

Where am I going with this? Nowhere else, really! I just want to make sure my readers know, I really don’t have an anti-blockbuster bias, people just need to tell themselves that when encountering my opinion. But that’s not my problem.

1. Though it was much better than Twisters…