 Every once in a while, a movie (remake/sequel, or re-imagining) will come along, shows me a trailer, and I'll wonder why the hell I should care. A lot of the time, my hunches about it are correct, and the film ends up being nothing but an easy cash-in for its respective studio. However, while pretty much all such titles are guilty of their cash-in methods, sometimes its done right. Sometimes the film will deliver good and memorable characters, a decent story, and in cases like 'Twisters', a huge leap forward in special effects.
I have always been one to defend 1996's 'Twister' as a fun popcorn action/adventure movie for a time when that kind of thing was what ran the box office - not superheroes. Even though by today's standards 'Twister' may not hold up for some, it was still something I thought didn't need any sort of sequel, as it stood on its own as a disaster classic (that's the genre, not the actual quality of the movie, though some will disagree). The trailer for this had me saying things like "so, they're just making the same movie?" To some degree I was kinda, sorta right about that, but upon seeing this, I decided I liked this chapter just a touch better than the classic disaster movie I had been defending so hard. This takes all the fun of 'Twister' and cranks it to eleven by offering up much, much better twister/storm scenes; most of which I understand were shot by technical consultants, including real-life storm chaser, Sean Casey (who seems to somehow go uncredited here, but his resume speaks for itself). Much like with the original, the opening of the film involves our lead, Kate Carter (Daisy Edgar-Jones) losing people important to her due to a tornado's brutal force. In this case, its during an attempt to launch a Dorothy V doppler (as seen in the original). While in the original it was done to study a tornado and its patterns in an attempt to predict them earlier, this time it involves using sodium polyacrylate beads meant to try to shrink the tornado, and make it less disastrous, and I'm sure this is not scientifically sound, but I'll come back to that. Kate and her friend, Javi (Anthony Ramos) survive the incident, but the experiment was ultimately unsuccessful, and Kate ends up blaming herself for the deaths of her colleagues, seemingly over nothing. She quits storm chasing, but Javi continues, and soon enough comes back into her life to get the plot moving. Now working for a company called Storm Par, Javi invites Kate to join them and try a new tornado scanning system. Of course, she eventually agrees based on the idea that they could be saving lives, especially with her keen senses. The team comes across "The Tornado Wrangler", Tyler Owens (Glen Powell); a wild cowboy type who chases these storms for kicks, and throws them onto YouTube. It's actually with this that the movie starts getting interesting, not only because it gets more fun, but it also dabbles with the concept of different companies and how they profit after a tornado has touched down. It's a good look at both sides of the equation, who's crooked, who's charitable, etc. I have to hand it to the film for giving us a generous combination of both a cash-in with its nostalgic-poking title, and actually delivering a product that was worked on as opposed to just being pushed out, hoping a name will put butts in seats. Much like its predecessor, it's a far from perfect movie, but it is a friendly reminder that sometimes we don't need to take movies like this so seriously. With great lines like "you don't face your fears, you ride 'em," one's clearly meant to have fun with this. 4/5
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