In 2022, Glen Powell co-starred in Top Gun: Maverick, a movie that hauled in a cool $1.5 billion at the worldwide box office, powered in part by IMAX format screenings that maximized the theatrical experience for film buffs, long starved by COVID and hungry for a return to pre-pandemic moviegoing normalcy.

While not on par with that slice of top-shelf, Tom Cruise-starring entertainment, the new disaster thriller Twisters, featuring the ascendant Powell in a much larger role, is similar in at least one respect: when one is watching the film on the big screen, especially in an IMAX presentation, you’re reminded in the simplest and most direct way of the communal power of movies, and submitting to their epic scale.
A standalone sequel to the 1996 film Twister, which starred Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt, Twisters again uses the ferocity of Mother Nature as the powering ingredient for its narrative, telling a simple story with no labored connections to its namesake predecessor, or awkwardly shoehorned-in legacy characters. Viewers first meet Kate Cooper (Daisy Edgar-Jones) as an idealistic Oklahoma college student, working with her friends and fellow storm chasers on an experiment to drain tornados of their intensity. Things go terribly wrong, unfortunately, and Kate’s passion for field work is destroyed.
Cut to: five years later. Kate is working as a low-level bureaucrat with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in New York City when her old friend Javi (Anthony Ramos) tracks her down and asks for Kate’s assistance with a special project: the implementation of a three-dimensional scanning system that will allow researchers unprecedented real-time information about how tornadoes gain and lose much of their power.
After initially rebuffing this call to action, Kate finally relents, agreeing to spend one week with Javi back in Oklahoma helping his start-up company, Storm Par. There, Javi and Kate’s ostensibly more serious work finds itself at odds with self-described hotshot “tornado wrangler” Tyler Owens (Powell), who oversees a spirited group who hoot, holler and shoot off fireworks while they film daredevil content for their one million-plus YouTube subscribers.

Dismissiveness and conflict eventually dissipate into mutual respect. Kate’s altruism (and friendship with Javi) is tested when she learns that Storm Par is funded by a vulture capitalist, Marshall Riggs (David Born), who swoops in and makes quick-cash offers to underinsured people who’ve just lost their homes and had their lives upended. At the same time, Kate learns that maybe Tyler isn’t quite just the glory-seeking yahoo that on the surface he sometimes appears. After reconnecting with her mother Cathy (Maura Tierney), and sifting through old research, Kate decides it might be time to resurrect and test the core premise of her earlier work.
Directed by Lee Isaac Chung, and scripted by Mark L. Smith, Twisters is a big summer movie in the throwback sense of the phrase, where spectacle, and giving audiences something both somewhat familiar and different from what they’ve seen before, is of paramount importance. Its story flails about for around 20 minutes or so, when focusing on the notion of “competing” storm-chase teams — something entirely alien to an average viewer. But the movie also injects enough mono-myth DNA into its characters and basic structure as to meet with Joseph Campbell’s enthusiastic approval, and give audiences something to hold onto.
Smith also makes a number of other smart choices; I appreciate, for example, that the supporting characters in Tyler’s posse function sort of in aggregate, as background color, rather than each being given their own “wacky” moment, or standalone beat. Focusing chiefly on Kate, Tyler, and to a slightly lesser extent Javi gives the movie stronger roots.
It also helps that Chung is quite adept at evoking a believable sense of community in shorthand strokes. The Golden Globe-winning Minari was Chung’s big breakthrough, but it was actually his fourth feature film. Twisters, of course, represents a step up in scale in just about every conceivable way — it’s probably 25 times the budget of all of Chung’s other movies combined. Here, he ably oversees the special effects work for the six big tornado set pieces, in a way that doesn’t overwhelm the proceedings.
 
Powell, fresh off a wildly charismatic turn in Hit Man, is a movie star in the making — if only the economics of theatrical exhibition allow for him to be coronated. Edgar-Jones, who gained recognition for her superb turn opposite Paul Mescal in the 2020 pandemic streaming hit Normal People, also delivers a very good performance. The pair are an appealing match, in the sense that their approaches are probably quite different and yet their modes of expression still fairly complementary.
Overall, Twisters doesn’t seek to reinvent the wheel. And, at times (and admittedly for certain viewers more than others), the “weather-porn” devastation-as-entertainment may come off as a bit dispiriting; in a real world with so much destruction and havoc, to which we’re all constantly subjected via social media, do movies of this sort really appeal to the better angels of our nature?
But Twisters is also engaging. And, with more success than most of Roland Emmerich’s large-canvas “disaster-pieces,” it tells a story on a human scale that also still deploys state-of-the-art movie magic that demands to be seen on a big screen. That’s an impressive accomplishment and no small feat. 

Our Rating

Summary
A film that absolutely demands to be seen on the big screen. The perfect showcase for IMAX technology and one hell of a wild ride!