- UK release: July 2024
- Director: Lee Isaac Chung · Writer: Mark L. Smith (story by Joseph Kosinski)
- Studio / distributor: Universal Pictures; Warner Bros; Amblin Entertainment; Kennedy/Marshall
- Genre: Disaster adventure / legacy sequel · Runtime: 122 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- Main cast: Daisy Edgar-Jones (Normal People, Where the Crawdads Sing) as Kate Carter; Glen Powell (Top Gun: Maverick, Hit Man) as Tyler Owens; Anthony Ramos (In the Heights) as Javi; Brandon Perea (Nope) as Boone
- IMDb: 6.5 / 10 · Rotten Tomatoes: 75% critics / 90% audience · My rating: 8 / 10
Nearly thirty years after the original, a Twister follow-up was never going to be an obvious bet. The 1996 film was a product of its moment, the early summer of the effects-driven studio spectacle, the one where a cow flies past the windscreen and nobody ever quite lets you forget it. A sequel arriving now has to answer a fair question: what is there to add, beyond better-looking weather? The surprise of Twisters is the name on the director’s chair. Lee Isaac Chung made Minari, a quiet, autobiographical Arkansas drama about a Korean family and a smallholding, about as far from a hundred-million-dollar disaster picture as you can get. Handing him the storm season turns out to be the smartest decision in the film.
The setup
Kate Carter (Daisy Edgar-Jones) is a gifted young meteorologist who walked away from field work after a chase went catastrophically wrong, and is now living a careful, grounded life in New York running weather models from a desk. A former colleague, Javi (Anthony Ramos), coaxes her back to Oklahoma for what he promises is a short stint testing a new radar-scanning rig, just as the worst tornado season in years begins tearing across the plains. There she runs into Tyler Owens (Glen Powell), a swaggering chaser with a YouTube following, a convoy of modified trucks and a line in selling merchandise to the crowd that gathers wherever he points his camera. The film sets her between the two operations, one corporate and clinical, one ramshackle and showy, while the storms keep getting bigger.
The cast
Edgar-Jones is the anchor, and she plays Kate as someone holding a great deal in. After Normal People and Where the Crawdads Sing she knows how to carry an interior wound without underlining it, and the film trusts her to be the still centre while everything around her is flying apart. Powell is the engine. Coming straight off Top Gun: Maverick and Hit Man, he has worked out exactly how much charm to deploy, and Tyler is built to be irritating before he is likeable, a cowboy-hatted showman who turns out to know precisely what he is doing. The chemistry between the two leads does a lot of work, prickly rather than gooey, and the film is wise enough not to rush it. Ramos gives Javi more decency than the script strictly needs, and Brandon Perea, fresh from Nope, supplies most of the easy laughs as Tyler’s crew member Boone.
The craft
Chung shoots the weather like a man who grew up under it. Dan Mindel’s photography keeps the camera low and in the dirt, and the storms have real menace because so much of the chaos is staged for the lens rather than rendered after the fact: practical wind, practical debris, practical water. There is a sequence in a small-town cinema and another at a rodeo that earn their scares the old-fashioned way, by making the geography legible so you understand what is about to come apart. Benjamin Wallfisch’s score knows when to drop out and let the sound of the wind do the threatening. At 122 minutes the film is tightly cut, and Chung brings something the original never had much time for: a feel for the people on the ground, the towns that get hit, the cost of all this spectacle to someone who actually lives there.
How it stacks up
The obvious measure is the 1996 Twister, and this is the better-directed film, more interested in its characters and less reliant on a single gimmick, even if it lacks that first picture’s lightning-in-a-bottle novelty. The closer cousin in spirit is Top Gun: Maverick: the same Glen Powell, the same Joseph Kosinski fingerprints on the story, the same conviction that a big crowd-pleaser can be made with real craft and real stakes rather than smirking at itself. Set it against Into the Storm or Geostorm and the gap is obvious; this is a disaster film that remembers a disaster needs people in the path of it. Dante’s Peak is the other honourable forebear, a nineties spectacle that took its science half-seriously and was the better for it.
Critics versus the rest of us
Critics have been warm rather than ecstatic, sitting around 75%, with the praise going to the practical staging and the cast and the reservations going to a screenplay that hits familiar beats and keeps any larger point about a changing climate carefully off the table. Audiences are well ahead at 90%, and on this one I am with the crowd. The criticisms are fair and they do not much matter once the sky goes green. This is a film doing an unfashionable thing extremely well: a summer blockbuster built for a packed house, with stakes you can read and a hero you end up rooting for despite yourself.
Verdict
I came in sceptical of a legacy sequel to a film that did not obviously need one, and left grinning. The storms are genuinely tense, the two leads are a pleasure to watch, and Chung gives the whole thing a sense of place that lifts it above the usual disaster fare. It is not reinventing anything, and the script plays it safe where it might have pushed. But it is exactly the kind of confident, well-made, big-screen entertainment that is rarer than it should be, and the sort I would happily put on again. 8⁄10.
Availability: On general release in UK cinemas now. This is one to see loud and large; the sound design alone is worth a proper screen.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: Twisters held up well through the summer and stands as one of the year’s better-liked studio blockbusters, with Glen Powell’s run as a leading man only gathering pace. Talk of a follow-up has circulated without anything confirmed. It is now available on digital and disc and streams on the relevant Universal and Peacock platforms depending on region; it remains a strong home-cinema demo for sound and picture.
BBFC content advice
Rated 12A by the BBFC for moderate threat, injury detail. The notes below may contain spoilers.
Threat and horror: People are swept away by powerful winds as tornadoes rapidly approach, resulting in their implied off-screen deaths. A tornado tears through an industrial plant, causing a large explosion. People narrowly avoid getting hit by falling vehicles and debris. Panicked civilians, including children, desperately seek shelter from an intense tornado. However, there is a focus on characters’ bravery and resourcefulness throughout.
Language: Mild bad language (‘screwed’, ‘ass’, ‘asshole’, ‘shit’) is accompanied by even milder terms such as ‘God’, ‘damn’ and ‘hell’.
Sex: A person comically tells a rival character to ‘blow [him]’.
Injury detail: A woman is shown with a large bloody gash across her thigh and a blood-stained face in the aftermath of a tornado.
Theme: There are infrequent very mild upsetting scenes relating to bereavement. However, the theme is dealt with sensitively.
Flashing/flickering lights: This work contains flashing images which may affect viewers who are susceptible to photosensitive epilepsy.
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk).
