I’m not sure I’ve ever seen Twister, but like most children of the nineties, I’ve seen various snatches of it on tv and studied the VHS case. Twister was just another movie that I never saw and the sequel was going to follow its shoes until I decided to do a double feature with it and Deadpool & Wolverine. And now having seen it, I feel confident saying that Twisters isn’t a particularly exceptional move.
It’s also a movie I ended up really enjoying, probably to an irrational extent. I think part of the reason why is that Twisters knows exactly what kind of movie it is and pulls it off and you probably know what kind of movie it is. There’s a woman who studies tornadoes, until during an experiment to disrupt one she loses people close to her. Years later, an old friend coaxed her back into the game to try again. And so there’s tornado chasing, there’s questionable science, there’s a hot rival chaser, and there are plenty of tornadoes that may or may not also represent a measure of trauma. You know this story, you know how it’s going to go. Twisters doesn’t try to surprise you, it’s not out here to elevate the genre. It’s here to tell that story the best it can.
And it does! Every beat happens just where you want them to and our characters are refined just enough for us to like them. Scenes evoke pity, fear, and catharsis with a precision that would make Aristotle proud. When Kate is sad we feel sad, when the tornado is terrifying, it scares, and when our heroes are triumphant, so are we. It all just works. There’s no need to add notes to a song when the melody is played so well.
Though the current climate crisis certainly informs the fear around natural disasters, as does the goal of being able to stop tornadoes echo a hope to avert climate change, those themes are all just background and a mirror to an anxious ethos. Twisters has no interest in a tidy moral or tract about fixing the planet. As far as this movie is concerned, tornadoes, and the power of nature, are cool as hell and tornadoes, which sometimes also represent trauma, can be chased, resisted, and maybe can be overcome. That’s all the movie needs, the movie knows that’s all it needs, and it makes good on it. It’s such a fun, unassuming movie, perfectly fine and all the better for it.
That said, the score is so much better than it needed to be.
Essays, Not Rants! 