It is well documented on our show how much I hate remakes and how wary I am of sequels. For me, a good test of the quality of these is the length of time between the release of the original film and its follow-up: if it is within a couple years, it usually means it was rushed to keep the popularity of the original going. On the other hand, if that timeframe spans decades, there is a greater chance that it pays off. With Twisters, we have a span of eighteen years, so let’s see how that goes.
Lee Isaac Chung (Minari) takes over for Jan De Bont in the director’s chair, enlisting a cast that includes Daisy Edgar-Jones, Glen Powell, Anthony Ramos, Brandon Perea, and Harry Hadden-Paton. Kate (Edgar Jones), lives in New York after an incident five years earlier as a college student and part of a storm chaser team in Oklahoma alongside Javi (Ramos). After an experiment goes horribly wrong, she tries to continue her passion for meteorology until she is visited by Javi, who is now working with new technology in Oklahoma to try to predict where tornadoes will strike in order to save lives. Kate reluctantly agrees and during the trip, she meets up with YouTube star Tyler (Powell), and as they chase storms against each other, more and more details are revealed about everyone involved as Kate is forced to face her past.
As can be expected with a film like this, the visuals are absolutely beautiful. The filming locations (which were in Oklahoma to keep things genuine) were great and with the CGI added it was awesome; I had high expectations and was not disappointed as it rivaled the previous film. The script itself does have a good mix of action and comedy with a standout performance from Hadden-Paton a fish-out-of-water English journalist following Tyler’s team perfectly.
However, I did not enjoy the script overall from a storytelling standpoint. Twisters runs just under two hours, and many scenes could have been cut. There is no originality from the first film with a pathetic level of suspension of disbelief. There is also a lot of “cheap” attempts at emotion and intensity, but it simply does not work. It just feels like a re-hash of the original, and with eighteen years to get here, there is SO much more that could have been done. I will not watch this film again and I cannot recommend it.
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