Twist and Shout
I remember as a child being traumatized by the tornado in “The Wizard of Oz.” Even today, the scene of Dorothy running for cover under threatening skies, rendered in an other-worldly sepia, gives me chills.
Recently, I read that the special effects director for “Oz,” Arnold Gillespie, created the cinematic monster by suspending muslin cloth from a steel gantry. Because, of course, in 1938 practical effects were all that moviemakers had to work with.
Fast forward nearly a hundred years and computers can do in a day what it took the movie pioneers back then weeks to accomplish.
And in “Twisters,” the eagerly anticipated sequel to the 1996 original “Twister,” state-of-the-art effects put you at ground level of not one, but six monstrously destructive tornadoes.
The story begins with the movie’s heroine, Kate Cooper, played by Daisy Edgar-Jones (“I Know Why the Crawdads Sing”) as a grad student testing a wild theory about how you might engineer the collapse of a tornado. She and her plucky crew of fellow students, including her boyfriend, ride into the maw of a huge twister.
The field test doesn’t go as planned and Kate spends a good deal of the movie in a funk, trying without much success to atone for her mistakes.
Years later, she’s approached by a surviving member of her team played by Anthony Ramos to join him in testing a radar-based 3-D mapping of a tornado, aided by a supercomputer. (By the way, the three mapping devices are, not coincidentally, named Scarecrow, Tin Man and Lion. It’s because in the original “Twister,” the computer used by storm chasers Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton was named Dorothy.) And Kate’s original team similarly named theirs Dorothy.
So, Kate, who by now is working as a NOAA meteorologist in New York, puts aside her misgivings and reluctantly accompanies Ramos in his quest.
It means a trip back to her native Oklahoma, which in this story is made to seem like the country’s tornado capital. And it’s there she runs into a social media star played by Glen Powell, who bills himself as the “Tornado Wrangler.” Powell plays Tyler Owens with a cowboy swagger and a thousand-watt smile that’s become the actor’s stock in trade (See “Top Gun: Maverick”).
Though Kate’s a nerdy scientist, Owens, whose macho smolder makes him a fictional YouTube star, is nonetheless smitten from the start. Which means their initial disparaging banter slowly grows into a mutual sort of admiration. It helps that they are often thrown into life-or-death situations where personal differences take a back seat to survival.
The dramatic scenes grow in intensity as do the twisters. And while sensible people might well drive away from spinning monsters that act like huge vacuums, these storm chasers drive right into them, braving heavy rain and baseball-size hail in the process.
The climax of the movie is a jaw-dropping sequence that involves a tornado ravaging a small town where the storm shelters are all full and the remaining townspeople take refuge in a movie theater. There’s no basement to escape to and everyone cowers in the seats as the tornadic winds rain bricks and plaster on those below.
“Twisters” isn’t interested in back stories. So, you won’t find much to explain why these storm chasers do what they do; perhaps it’s risking their lives for war stories to tell at whatever local bar they spill into after a harrowing day on the road. But frankly, in a movie that’s very nearly non-stop action, and a terrifying action at that, who really needs reasons and resumes?
As summer movies go, this one fills the bill. You’ll walk out of the theater feeling, as I did, like a pinball that took a beating but couldn’t quite find a safe place to land.