Twister was not a masterpiece. In fact, I missed it the first time around and only saw it a few years ago. It may seem strange now, considering the massive amount of content that’s available digitally, but when I was a kid, it was physical media. So you had to get people to agree to watch a movie and then go to a place and rent it. My crush on Helen Hunt was never enough to win the argument as to what to rent, so I didn’t see it.
And I don’t know if that makes it better or worse, my experience of Twisters. Twister itself was a fairly ridiculous movie, but it did have a certain charm about it and it felt like a 90s disaster movie and lived up to that billing fairly well enough. Twisters has more expectation coming with it because, whatever my opinion of the original movie is, a lot of people hold great affection for it, and decades later, there are some fairly big shoes to fill for Twisters. Sure, they’re not Star Wars big, but I know lots of people who loved Twister. And I am an unabashed fan of Glen Powell. Ever since saw him grace my screen as the purposefully douchey Chad Radwell in Scream Queens, I thought he was the best thing about that show and I’ve been following his career ever since. I even watched Anyone But You and enjoyed it. He’s got a way of playing a character that you probably shouldn’t like, but do for some reason, and, well, I have to admire that. His role in Top Gun: Maverick was just about the only thing I liked about that lazy rehash of the 80s classic mixed with a Death Star Trench Run against a nameless enemy. So despite the tepid reviews (the curse of the 70% range on Rotten Tomatoes continues, with this movie scoring a 75% and a whopping 91% audience score), I had relatively medium-high expectations for the film when I saw it come across my Peacock feed.
I’ll start with the good. The majority of actors in the film do a really good job with what they’re given. Glen Powell does not disappoint, despite the fact that everyone else was in a movie and his character was shot like he was in a Wrangler Jeans commercial. Daisy Edgar-Jones was a true delight, never underselling her character and doing her best to bring emotional weight to the film. Anthony Ramos, yes, John Laurens himself from the original cast of Hamilton, once again brings his immense talent to a blockbuster popcorn flick for which he is overqualified and, again, convincingly plays his character with the talent and aplomb that you’d expect from someone who broke out as an original Hamilton cast member. I am really excited to see where his career goes. And the same goes for Daisy Edgar-Jones, because if she can put in the shift she did in Twisters, I cannot wait to see what she can do with a really hefty, weighty role. Now, to be fair, I believe her miniseries Normal People was well received, I’ve never seen Where the Crawdads Sing (which was not, at least critically), and I’ve only seen her in Under the Banner of Heaven, which was much more of an ensemble cast than a vehicle for her talent.
Even with the compression that happens with streaming media, the audio was fairly well mixed and the visuals came through with good fidelity. I knew I was looking at CGI a lot, but it wasn’t so bad that it took me out of the moment, nor did I ever have trouble hearing the characters’ dialogue over the roar of the multiple tornados. On the technical side, the movie was certainly successful.
But from a writing standpoint, it was very rough. It doesn’t really matter how good or talented your cast is if your script feels like it was written by an 8th grader. That’s harsh, I know, but after having watched so many good movies last month with you all, I had a hard time not contrasting it Late Night with the Devil, a movie in which not a single word, nor even a single frame of video was wasted; with Twisters, so much of it felt like filler to hit a minimum two hour runtime (the extra 2 minutes were icing on the cake, I suppose). It starts with a flashback, which came with the painfully obvious immediate conclusion that it was about to turn into a bloodbath, because none of the characters were in a single trailer I saw for the film. And that’s fine, it’s fine to spoon feed your audience trauma when you’ve got a film centered on a traumatized character; I’m not always against flashbacks. But when you then rehash the opening 10 minutes of the film to explain what happened to another character, it sometimes feels like a clip show in the middle of the movie, a “previously on” segment that shouldn’t really be necessary because I just saw that scene an hour ago. Adding insult to this, in that scene where she explains what happened, Edgar-Jones gives such an excellent performance selling her character’s emotions that it showcased what a good actress she is. If there had been enough trust in the character and in the audience, that whole first scene could have been cut, because Edgar-Jones is a clearly a strong enough actress to convey what her character is going through, explain her reluctance to join Ramos’s team, and do it without zipping the spoon around like an airplane and telling the audience to open wide for the mashed pea purée landing. I didn’t expect this film to blow me away, pardon the pun, but it could have been so much better and paced so much tighter with just a few tweaks. Because the talent is there; in the rare moments that the script allows the actors to shine, they do. This is not a low budget movie trying to punch above its weight class as a blockbuster, these are talented people playing roles very well, despite the writing. It should have been better.
The structure of the movie, after the initial flashback scene, follows a terribly boring formula. It goes storm, talking scene, storm, talking scene, storm, talking scene, and so on and so forth. There’s no real buildup of the story, there’s nothing it works towards, and it just feels like the time between storms is there to take up space between monster attacks, except in this case, the monster is CGI wind. The movie has no flow, it has subplots that go nowhere, and a shoehorned romance between two characters that are so wildly not into each that it’s almost Jurassic World-level insulting. Add to that a generic country music soundtrack in the talking scenes, all that rural noun, simple adjective, good ol’ boy bullshit, makes for a movie that’s a fairly unpleasant experience unless you’re just there for the spectacle of carnage. Everything just happens and the climax occurs out of nowhere; the same as the tornadoes that occur in the other storm scenes. I know these are storm-chasers and meteorologists and researchers, but they have Jack Bauer levels of bad luck when it comes to being in the path of funnel-shaped terror. The movie flirts with the idea that climate change is causing strife for people and that there are those who are willing and happy to take advantage of that strife for their own personal gain, but it never comes close to actually having anything to say. And somehow, that’s worse than not even trying, not even paying the half-assed lip service to what’s going on in the real world in which this movie is supposedly set.
How 91% of people enjoyed this, I’ll never know. I worked very hard to enjoy myself while watching Twisters, and I just about did, until I sat down at my desk, starting thinking about it, and opened up this document. It just makes me so disappointed to see what could have been a just fine summer blockbuster end up being such a huge waste of great actors because the studio and the writing just didn’t trust the audience to do some real storytelling. It’s difficult to think of a movie that was so simultaneously overstuffed and yet so boring, but still with very good acting performances. And maybe Twisters is worth watching just for that. And maybe you’ll think I’m wrong and you’ll have just a lovely time with it. Clearly, I’m in the minority here. And baffled as to why.