Peter Viney's Blog

Directed by Lee Isaac Chung
Screenplay by Mark L. Smith
Story by Joseph Kosinski
Based on the characters by by Michael Crichton & Anne-Marie Martin
Executive Producer – Steven Speilberg

Daisy Edgar-Jones – Kate Carter
Glen Powell- Tyler
Anthony Ramos – Javi
Maura Tierney- Cathy, Kate’s mother
David Born – Riggs, property developer and financier
Daryl McCormack- Jeb, Kate’s original boyfriend, college project
Nick Dodani- Praveen, college project
Kiernan Shipka – Addy, college project
David Corenswet- Scott, businessman working with Javi
Brandon Perea – Boone, Tyler’s crew
Sasha Lane – Lily, Tyler’s crew
Tunde Adebimpe- Dexter, Tyler’s crew
Katy O’Brien – Dani, Tyler’s crew
Harry Haddon-Patten – Ben, British journalist

Twister? Twisted? Twisters? Everybody’s Twisting? Chubby Checker is not involved. The 2024 plural one, 

We were in Exeter. It started raining.  14.45. Check film times on the phone. Twisters was starting right away at The Odeon, a five minute walk away. It would be adverts and trailers first. We got in, missed the ads, which was a joy, but saw the superhero trailers which was not a joy. There is some absolute crap filling screens. Deadpol v Wolverine. Utter nonsense. 

Still we were watching Twisters not Wolverine, The first fifteen minutes sets the story. Kate is a student meteorologist and is on a project with her university student friends, Praveen, Addy, Javi and her boyfriend and partner, Jeb. They are testing Kate’s idea that releasing a load of chemicals (sodium polyacrylate, so IMDB tells me) into a tornado will break it up. It fails disastrously. The silver foil  test balls with the chemicals fly 70,000 feet up. Twice the height of a plane. Really? Are tornados that tall? Well, it was a big one. Kate is traumatised by the disaster. 

We think, ten minutes in, can the tornado effects get better than this? They will. 

The screen switches to FIVE YEARS LATER. Kate is working in New York. Javi, a survivor of the earlier disaster (he was in the follow up truck) turns up. He has a new job researching tornados in Oklahoma, can Kate help for a week? Javi’s smartly uniformed team are called ‘Storm Par’ and have gleaming white trucks, and have major financial backing, and all of them have doctorates. However Kate has a knack of watching the amber waves of grain (that’d be a good song title) in the fields and knowing where storms will go.

Over to Mills and Boone romantic novels. Years ago at a literary festival we went to a talk on how to write a Mills & Boone bestseller. I have described this before, I won’t check where, so minor details will differ. The speaker, Dolores someone, wore a pink skirt suit, a flouncy blouse, high heels, lots of jewellery, exquisite make up, elaborate fingernail extensions and expensively coiffured hair. She asked if she looked like the author of romantic novels. We nodded in awe. She kicked off her shoes, sat on the table and said, ‘Me real name’s Pat and I’m a maths teacher from Accrington. I write two books a year, each researched by a long holiday in an exotic location with me partner. Here’s the formula …’

The formula is time honoured. We identify with the heroine. The heroine is pursued by a man who is seemingly good, smart, attractive  and worldly wise. Another man appears. He is a ruffian. Alpha male. Badly dressed, rude, poorly shaven with stubble preferably so manly, too male really, but with a twinkle in his eye. She immediately loathes him. However, it will turn out that the good one has dark secrets, and the bad one will turn out to be brave, heroic with a heart of gold. Her deep loathing eventually turns into love. 

In this film, their names are Kate, Javi and Tyler. Though in the end, Javi will eschew the dark secrets he is hiding and be heroic too.

No plot spoilers, but Tyler aka ‘The Tornado Wrangler’ has a popular You Tube tornado chasing site. His crew are a bunch of scruffy semi hippies in beaten up vehicles who do really dangerous stuff.

They are in competition with Javi and his pristine team of doctors of science. Tyler also sneers at Kate as a New Yorker, but she turns out to be from an Oklahoma farm nearby. Add a comic rather effete English journalist who has joined Tyler’s crew to do an article. So a typical Hollywood English clown.

It is a few days of incessant and sudden tornados. No one mentions global warming explicitly but we get the idea. There were never this many in the past. There are spectacular scenes at a rodeo where Tyler takes Kate, and tells her used to be a rodeo cowboy ewhich explains his driving style. After the ensuing disaster, Kate works out why Riggs is financing Javi. Actually, none of us were clear how Storm Par’s projected 3D views of a tornado could help Rigg’s plans, but just go with it. Riggs is a villain.

Kate retreats to her Mom’s farm. Tyler turns up at the door. He is strangely moved. Tyler turns out to be a trained meteorologist himself. He picks up her research paper and feeds it into his laptop.

Kate’s experiment failed because there weren’t enough drums of chemicals. He works out they can triple the number and fire some silver iodine rockets up too as his truck has rocket launchers for fireworks which they like to fire into tornados to amuse their YouTube viewers. Silver Iodine can be used for cloud seeding, causing rainstorms, or as the English villages of Lynton and Lynmouth discovered when the RAF tried it, floods and fatalities. All this stuff, sodium polyacrylate, yellow oil drums and silver iodine, seem readily available on a rural Oklahoma farm of course.

The finale takes place in a cinema as the tornado strikes. The cinema is showing the 1930s Universal film of Frankenstein, as cinemas so often do nowadays. The effects look fantastic, the disasters look disastrous. The chemistry lesson passed right over our heads.

Film viewers complained that Kate and Tyler never get to kiss. People like Daisy Edgar-Jones and Glen Powell. They want action. The director says they filmed a kiss ending, but decided it was too obvious. He put it on YouTube. It went viral. Here it is, a snog scraped off the cutting room floor. No worries, it’ll be in the Directors Cut I expect.

It’s highly watchable. The effects are way beyond the 1996 original film, Twister, though we saw the original of that at the cinema, but never rewatched it on DVD so that’s only memory. It’s a new story. It is a perfect example of a big screen super surround system movie. It will not be the same at home.