Quick LinksThe Real Storm-Chasers’ Equipment Served as Inspiration Could Chemicals Really Stop a Tornado?
Universal’s Twisters, a sequel to the similarly awesome Twister, is a summer blockbuster par excellence. It not only raked in a whole lot of money its first weekend, it also garnered a positive critics score of 77% on Rotten Tomatoes. Twisters is a hit and stars Daisy Edgar-Jones and Glen Powell are only part of the reason. The rest of it has to do with the action sequences where special effects bring the tornadoes to vivid life. To get that right, the production turned to Sean Waugh at the National Severe Storm Laboratory (NSSL).

Though the tornadoes in Twisters are fake, the science of it all is real, and Waugh and his team are largely to thank for that. Just like the storm chasers and scientists in the movie, Waugh spends both his work days and free time inventing and utilizing technology to understand tornadoes. Let’s take a look at Twisters and how Waugh and his colleagues inspired aspects of the story.

What Is Twisters About?
Twisters 3.5/5 Release Date July 19, 2024 Director Lee Isaac Chung Runtime 2h 2m Expand

Like Twister before it, Twisters is about storm chasers, but that’s largely where the similarity ends. Twisters starts with an experiment. Daisy Edgar-Jones’ Kate is sure she can tame a tornado with the right mix of chemicals. She and her teammates go out in the middle of a storm and not only do her chemicals not work, three of her teammates are swept away and killed by the winds. Five years later, Kate no longer chases tornadoes or hopes to tame them. But her friend and one surviving teammate, Javi, finds her in New York and convinces her to come down to Oklahoma to chase storms with his team at Storm Par, a tornado radar company, for one week.

The first day she’s there, she meets Tyler Owens (Glen Powell), a YouTube personality and content creator known as the “Tornado Wrangler,” and his team. Though Kate is initially distrustful of Tyler, she eventually learns that his team uses the profits from the sale of merchandise to aid victims of tornadoes. When, after a tornado that Kate barely survived, Javi appears to blame Kate for getting their friends killed five years prior, Kate goes to her mother’s house, which is nearby. Tyler follows her and learns about her research, and she eventually accepts his help to continue.

Universal Pictures

Twisters is directed by Lee Isaac Chung with a great deal of sympathy for the people dealing with tornadoes — and a great deal of technical expertise in filming the spectacular scenes of tornadoes bearing down on our heroes. There’s also a lot of tech-speak about tornadoes that most of us won’t have a clue about, but for those who do, they may be surprised to find that everything that’s said is technically correct. That’s partially the responsibility of Waugh and his team, and they’ve done a great job making sure the movie gets it right. Here are some of the other things they helped with.

The Real Storm-Chasers’ Equipment Served as Inspiration
Universal Pictures 

Dr. Waugh told Scientific American that the people at NSSL are constantly developing new technology to observe and collect data to push the limits of what can be done in the field.

“The movie crew latched on to this work. They came down to NSSL to model props and story elements on real equipment we have at the lab. Aspects are dramatized, of course. But the central premise and scientific methods in the story are real.”

For example, the film’s Storm Par team uses essentially the same setup as the real-life researchers. That’s because, as Dr Waugh explained to the New York Times, “I actually built the equipment for the movie.” As in the fictional world, the people at the NSSL are trying to answer the same question — how does a tornado take shape? But the nonfiction researchers’ equipment can’t be deployed off a truck and left in the path of a tornado like that of the Storm Par team. At least not yet. Dr. Waugh said:

“We’re going to see that technology kind of move away from science fiction and into more of a reality space where we might be able to pull that kind of thing off.”

Related Twisters Star Pays Loving Tribute to Bill Paxton Glen Powell takes to social media and honors the memory of friend and colleague Bill Paxton as Twisters storms into movie theaters.

Furthermore, Dr. Waugh says the well-honed intuition for tornadoes that Daisy Edgar-Jones’s character has in Twisters and Bill Paxton’s character had in Twister is based in reality too. Dr. Waugh told Scientific American:

“We make educated guesses based on several different models, which aren’t perfect. Not only do we have an incomplete dataset, but we also lack a complete understanding of the physical process. This is where the human aspect comes into play; being able to look at all this information and say, ‘You know what, my gut tells me this is going to happen differently.’ People who are skilled at storm chasing and frequently encounter severe weather naturally develop this insight.”

Could Chemicals Really Stop a Tornado?

The biggest question that Twisters poses, though, is whether chemicals could actually disrupt a tornado. Dr. Waugh explained to the New York Times that Kevin Kelleher, a semi-retired researcher who was a consultant on both the original and the sequel, and a team did the math. That led to the movie’s main plot point, the thing that ultimately drives the story forward. But while the movie posited that Kate just needs a large trailer of chemicals to disrupt the storm, in real life, the amount of chemicals needed makes it physically impossible, according to Waugh. Mr. Kelleher explained that, even if researchers could get enough chemicals, it would still take 15 to 20 minutes for the tornado to absorb them. The creative inaccuracies don’t bother Mr. Kelleher, though. “It’s for fun,” he says.

Related Twisters Director Says Film Is ‘New Science Experiment’ Twisters’ Lee Issac Chung declares that his new film is neither a sequel nor a reboot: “I see it as a new science experiment.”

Every tornado researcher has asked themselves an even bigger question when it comes to taming a storm, as Kate does in Twisters. Should they? Dr. Waugh explained:

“Weather modification is a really tricky business because we don’t know what the outcomes of it would be.”

Because every piece of weather happens for a reason, if researchers interfere with it, they don’t know what could happen. So, while Twisters paints a rosy picture of the good that comes with disrupting a tornado, in real life that energy would have to go somewhere, and it’s hard to know what would really happen. Therefore, the best thing for those of us not involved in tornado research to do is to enjoy the movie while not taking anything it proposes too seriously.