Twisters | Directed by Lee Isaac Chung | Written by Mark L. Smith and Joseph Kosinski | 117 min | ▲△△△△ | Amazon Prime

I’m not sure why this new picture is being marketed as a sequel (check out my rewatch review of the original below). Twisters is a stone cold reboot with no characters from the first movie showing up. Instead we get a few plot points rehashed in a less engaging way.

Twisters is a movie that singularly fails to justify itself. While it’s startlingly wholesome it’s also incredibly dull — the predecessor was a bit of a romcom in disaster pants but this one’s about as sexy as chalk. The plot cleaves to the most obvious, predictable beats while the filmmakers don’t seem to understand that in order to feel the jeopardy for their characters the story’s got to have stakes. Without bad weather on screen, Twisters just lies there.

This as it features two freshly minted, good-looking stars as the leads. Daisy Edgar-Jones is Kate Cooper, an environmental scientist struggling with the guilt around her boyfriend and former teammates who were killed by a deadly tornado while trying to get her storm-tech to work. Glen Powell is Tyler Owens, a hotshot tornado wrangler who makes his living filming his exploits for YouTube stardom.

Kate is out of the chasing game and living in New York when the only other survivor of the killer storm, Javi (Anthony Ramos), recruits her to join his well-financed new team (including a grumpy David Corenswet) in Oklahoma, while the redneck attention-grabbers on Tyler’s team (Sasha Lane, Tunde Adebimpe, and Brandon Perea amongst them) make a lot of noise.

Do you think Javi’s money might be coming from a compromised source and the yahoos with the cowboy hats might turn out to be the good guys? The audience is three steps ahead of where this movie wants us to be, which robs it of suspense.

I won’t deny the picture’s special effects — seat-shaking, howling wind, menacing storm clouds and flying debris — have improved since the first one, and its use of those country anthems as a mix of diagetic and nondiagetic needledrops is actually a more effective part of the storytelling than the first movie where much of the soundtrack was just played off in the background.

The storm chasers eventually end up abandoning their need to use tech to better understand or maybe even stop the storms and instead try to help people living in towns who are in the path of the storms. These are Oklahomans living in Tornado Alley — why would they need the help? You’d think they’d have enough experience to know when a storm is coming and seek shelter, and not need these outsiders in trucks to direct them.

In the first movie, the unhinged passion of the leads was palpable — you got the feeling that storm chasing was a real adrenaline rush, that they were addicted to it. With Kate, her motivations are never as clearly defined. Sure, she’s got that guilt haunting her, but we’re never certain that chasing storms again is what’s going to give her closure. She could just walk away any time, and without much romantic heat between her and Tyler that’s not a hook either. Edgar-Jones, Ramirez and Powell barely seem like they’re adults in this movie — they still read as teens playing at being grownups, which is a major casting and directorial problem for Twisters, though on the list of things wrong with this nonsense it barely breaks the top 10.

The biggest bad here is a tedious summer popcorn movie, a cardinal sin for the season. Director Lee Isaac Chung serves up the most anodyne sort of disaster porn when this should be terrifying stuff, the subtext of the climate crisis undeniable. How can we have a weather-related disaster movie that doesn’t, even subtly, reference the warming planet?  Turns out Twisters is just silly.

Twister (1996) | Directed by Jan de Bont | Written by Michael Crichton & Anne-Marie Martin | 113 min | ▲▲▲△△ | Starz

The disaster movie made a resurgence in the 1990s, and this was a big one — the second biggest US box office hit of 1996 — directed by Speed demon Jan de Bont, who only directed five features before calling it a day after a Lara Croft sequel. This one has a lot of energy and solid cast flattered with sustained close-ups while yelling and driving into storms — but despite some of the clunkier cliches of the era, and some truly abysmal early CGI, it delivers.

Bill (Bill Paxton) and Jo (Helen Hunt) are on the outs — formerly married, she’s delaying signing the divorce papers. Not only were they married, they’re fellow scientists who specialize in analyzing tornadoes. He’s about to start a new life with his fiancé, therapist Melissa (Jamie Gertz). But when he gets around Jo and his team of storm chasers, he immediately gets caught up in their mission — which is to launch a brand new tech into a tornado that should help better predict when a storm is coming.

What’s really going on is that Bill and Jo have unfinished personal stuff and all the driving and life-risking is what they share. In five minutes it’s obvious things aren’t gonna work out with Bill and Melissa, so we’ve gotta go through this romcom-like dance.

Surrounding that is fantastic cast in support, a wrecking crew of indie actors so much better than the material, amongst them Alan Ruck, Joey Slotnick, Jeremy Davies, Zach Grenier, Patrick Fischler, Lois Smith, Cary Elwes as a competing stormchaser and total asshole, and the much missed Philip Seymour Hoffman who is fantastic in the part — his character, Dusty, likes to play Deep Purple on loudspeakers as the team approaches the funnel cloud. The tang of loss haunts Twister — Paxton gone too soon as well.

Why was it that every movie in the ‘90s worked overtime to sell its soundtrack of pop and rock songs, which meant hearing them in the background of scenes for no good story reason. The Van Hagar reunion song, “Humans Being,”  is reasonably well used, but Tori Amos should’ve sued — they did her dirty.  The script had enough going on in it to keep the interest with a few fun cinematic references including Repo Man, Star Wars, and quite a lot of The Shining showing at a drive-in. (I want to live in that town, tornadoes notwithstanding.)

And yes, while the CGI has aged badly — it’s amazing anyone thought it was good enough at the time — the practical effects have not at all. We get cars flipped into the air, some turned upside down and dropped onto the road, we get two-by-fours driven into walls, we get a whole lot of debris, and with the run-and-gun shooting and sharp editing, it’s better than you might think.

Full marks to Helen Hunt, who at this point in her career was considered a television actor at a time when there was a wall between TV and movies. She can do the verbal sparring with Paxton, but they don’t really have much in the way of chemistry. She really delivers in scenes where she says little and just lets her face share everything she’s trying to hide. She’s the best thing in the movie.