Twisters is a good ol' summer blockbuster

September 8, 2024

Twisters is a good ol' summer blockbuster with all the markers of a post-2020 movie, including a script and cast carefully crafted to make the movie maximally awards eligible. Even the vehicles the bad guys drive are white. No black SUVs here! The downside is that the villains, whose villainy is pretty tame to begin with, look like they're part of the kind of pest control service you occasionally see driving around in your neighborhood. Not very menacing.

The movie's protagonist, Kate (played by Daisy Edgar-Jones), is a tornado-formation and movement expert haunted by the memory of three of her storm-chasing Ph.D.-candidate team members getting killed by a powerful tornado.

She is dragged into the plot by Javi (Anthony Ramos), the other survivor of the team, who sells her on the idea of using a thingamajig to collect potentially life-saving tornado data.

While waiting for a twister to form in Oklahoma's Tornado Valley (more like Tornado Hourly in the movie, amirite?), self-styled "Tornado Wrangler" and storm chasing YouTube celebrity Tyler Owens (Glen Powell) rolls in with his crew of weather outlaws.

From there various things happen and Tyler and Kate fall in affection as towns around them are obliterated by twisters and Javi's true motives are revealed. Winds howl and people scream.

Twisters is neither terrible nor great. The primary reason for watching it in a theater is that if people like you and I don't buy tickets to movies like Twisters there won't be any theaters for us to go to and that would be terrible.