REEL | Chasing 'Twisters' – Daisy Edgar-Jones Storms Hard

"If you feel it, chase it!"

Universal Pictures / Warner Bros. Pictures

Korean-American director Lee Isaac Chung brings his talent for trauma-based character drama to disaster studio blockbuster fare in his standalone follow-up to the 1996 hit action thriller Twister. Twisters (note the plural with an "s") takes tornado chasing and its cinematic depiction even further on screen for another sensational epic worthy of its mid-'90s predecessor.

Attractive stars on the rise, Daisy Edgar-Jones and Glen Powell, take over the mantle admirably from Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton in the lead romantic pairing both obsessed with better understanding tornadoes and the literal and human destruction they leave behind. Twisters plays with the original's archetype setup, reversing some of the roles from the first film, before settling in nicely to the expected disaster romance aspects.

There's a colourful cast of co-stars, including Anthony Ramos as the expert storm chaser turned businessman, who grounds the folksy charm of the middle America, Oklahoma setting. Chung uses shorthand to establish the quick chase of the film by wasting no time in introducing who Edgar-Jones' Kate is, her backstory, past trauma, and expertise before putting a one-week deadline on the film's mission. She does a ton of heavy-lifting acting through her expressive facial acting while Powell employs the same sort of heartthrob machismo that's already made him a star.

Scripted by Mark L. Smith from a story by director Joseph Kosinski, who originally developed the project, there's a welcome efficiency to Twisters throughout its runtime. How it builds the human drama around the various storms and tornadoes it dramatizes feels particularly natural. They add to the thrilling nonsense action with some dazzling set-pieces that balance the heart of its characters' arcs.

Twisters suitably fulfills its promise of returning to a past era of loud disaster entertainment. Chung uses his bag of necessary contrivances well to properly set up and tell his film economically while adding urgent elements of climate change, humanitarian relief, and runaway capitalism. Its callbacks and small references to the original Twister are fairly light, casual, and referential while making something refreshingly exciting from a well-worn premise.


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