Twisters Review - The '90s blockbuster gets a second wind in a teeth-chattering sequel.

Minari director Lee Isaac Chung's disaster flick delivers a good dose of meteorological mayhem.

It's been nearly 30 years since the meteorological mayhem of Jan de Bont's Twister, and the premise of this late sequel remains much the same. The most minimal veneer of science is deployed (in this case, filling a tornado with a chemical to tame it) as justification for two hours of teeth-chattering special effects and SUVs tossed around like an angry child's Tonka toys. Lee Isaac Chung directs this acceptable disaster movie, a change of pace and direction after the delicate, cerebral approach of his previous film, Minari.

Daisy Edgar-Jones plays Kate, a Midwestern farm girl who had a sixth sense for tornadoes until a tragedy took her away from storm chasing. Lured back to work on a weather mapping project, she meets Tyler (Glen Powell), the cowboy tornado keeper and YouTube star who rides storms the way other people ride rodeo bulls. The chemistry between them is perfect, but the real fun is watching the buildings open up like sardine cans.

The new film continues Hollywood's relentless stream of sequels, prequels, reboots, revivals, remakes and spinoffs.

The original Twister may not be a great movie, but the years have made it look better and better – for the same reasons that a vintage Gap jacket looks like a designer garment. Now that stores only sell clothes made from plastic sheeting and surgical staples in fast-fashion gulags, what used to be considered basic construction – things like finished seams and sturdy material – become downright luxurious by comparison. By the standards of 2020s content swill, many of the elements that made Jan de Bont's 1996 film a meat-and-potatoes blockbuster now seem almost artisanal, and I don't just mean the practical effects, which involved huge wind machines and tractors dropped from helicopters, and which have held up remarkably well.

This weekend, another variant hits theaters: “Twisters,” directed by Lee Isaac Chung (after his Oscar-winning “Minari,” 2020) and starring several of today's most promising or rising stars, including Daisy Edgar-Jones, Anthony Ramos and the star of the moment, Glen Powell. Loosely related to 1996's “Twister,” it's somewhere between a sequel and a remake: it departs from the concept of the original, but doesn't require substantial knowledge of the first film.

An overwhelming strength of this new version: Its visual effects are impressive and immersive. The tornadoes look like the real thing, something the original couldn't achieve because the technology didn't exist 30 years ago. Similarly, the film's storyline illustrates how storm chasing has changed since “Twister.” There is also a greater sense of urgency for the characters, as storms are now more frequent and severe.

I can't say that I loved all the main story arcs. Some of the secondary characters are very one dimensional, stereotypical and quite uninteresting. Most of Tyler's crew falls into this category. The actors weren't necessarily bad, but you just didn't care about them. I know when I can't remember the names of the characters we've spent the last couple of hours with, they're just not that interesting. Other than the three main characters, I couldn't tell you the names of any of those characters.

It's unclear why Edgar-Jones, who exudes the Britishness of a Liberty of London party dress, keeps getting cast in very regionally specific American roles. But the film's verisimilitude of her Oklahoma accent, whose intermittency may or may not be deliberate, is less of a problem than the fact that the film revolves around her character's ability to rediscover her ability to read time. 

Pulled back to her home state from New York City by an enterprising former colleague named Javi (an ultimately underused Anthony Ramos)-whose obvious infatuation places him at the sharp end of a malformed love triangle once Tyler enters the scene-she gradually overcomes her survivor's guilt in a journey less emotional than a series of scripted vignettes to endure. Every time Tyler strolls through a scene with his specially equipped truck and entourage (consisting of Brandon Perea, Sasha Lane, Love Lies Bleeding star Katy O'Brian and TV on the Radio's Tunde Adebimpe), he seems to be in a much funnier movie than the one we're treated to, which can never square its gleefully destructive spectacle with its guilty insistence on showing the human cost of that spectacle.

This impersonal exaltation of heroic exploits leaves an unexplored dilemma at the heart of the film. A key detail, in the traumatic opening sequence, raises questions about the ethics and risks of scientific research. When Kate, Javi and their colleagues manage to throw a load of polymer through the funnel of a tornado, they observe that, instead of shrinking, the tornado grows. The scene introduces the heartbreaking possibility that the test has not only failed, but caused damage. Yet over the course of the film, Kate, for all the guilt she feels over the death of her friends, never once considers that her method of taming the tornado might have turned her into the Dr. Frankenstein of meteorology, whose miscalculations created a more monstrous storm. If she harbors a shred of self-doubt or a glimmer of scientific awareness about it, the film never suggests it. Instead, she's a porcelain heroine just waiting for a white knight to give her confidence and further embolden her spirit of experimentation. For all its concessions to modern times, “Twisters” doesn't advance much at all.