Does Twisters Have Any Breath? (Review)

Effective, invested, spectacular, and even a little touching: the new Twister conscientiously fulfills its popcorn contract.

Hold, Twister returns. In the plural, with an “s”, like in the good old days ofAliens. Jan de Bont’s original film was one of the biggest hits of the summer of 1996 (that ofIndependance Dayof Rock and of Impossible mission) and today constitutes an interesting artifact of the summer blockbuster Spielbergo-catastrophe of the 90s, with its duo of nearby stars (Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton), its cows swirling in the air, its Michael Crichton in the script, and this “amblind” light which always ended up piercing through the clouds and allowed us to see a wind of hope rising.

28 years later, the disaster movie has lost its popcorn innocence, and you can no longer produce a movie about giant tornadoes without keeping in mind the proliferation of extreme weather events that the world is experiencing today. The “s” in the title underlines that too – even if, in reality, the film only touches on climate change half-heartedly. Although the situation is serious, the main aim is to deliver a great, unifying spectacle, perhaps a little less carefree than the original, but just as programmatic: a crescendo of tornado scenes, each more spectacular than the last, in a corner of the American countryside seen as a huge playground, coated with human dramas aimed at giving a little flesh and meaning to the affair.

The tone screwball and vaguely gonzo of the first film has disappeared, and the comedy of remarriage (Twister was primarily a portrait of a man who can’t get his wife to sign the divorce papers) gives way to a story of mourning and reconstruction. Traumatized by a tornado that she observed a little too closely, hidden in New York in a weather station sheltered from bad winds, Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones) is called back to her old job as a tornado chaser, and to her native Oklahoma, by Javi (Anthony Ramos), a former colleague who is experimenting with a new hi-tech system allowing him to better study this devastating phenomenon, and to hope to reduce its danger.

There, Kate will have to face the dirty methods and devastating charm of a “YouTube redneck”, Tyler Owens, a show-off cowboy who racks up millions of views by getting ever closer to tornadoes that he pretends to tame like wild horses, to the great joy of his subscribers. This “tornado wrangler” is played by Glen Powell, a supporting role in Top Gun: Maverick on the way to express stardom since Everything but you and the Hit Man by Richard Linklater, very good in this role of a redneck less stupid than he seems, and well matched with Edgar-Jones in a tandem in the tradition ofAfrican Queen or ofIn pursuit of the green diamond – the rough adventurer and the uptight intellectual – here slightly reinvented.

What happens to Kate and Tyler is as predictable as the rest of the film, but that’s not necessarily a criticism. Some films thrive on how well they stick to a formula, and Twisters is one of them. Dispatched on his first blockbuster, the director Lee Isaac Chung, spotted thanks to the success of the pretty indie drama with an autobiographical flavor Minari – and therefore not necessarily the profile we expected at the helm of this kind of film – succeeds in everything, without genius, certainly, but in a professional and square way: the character portraits, the action scenes that blow your mind, the eyes raised towards the immense skies of Oklahoma, the pleasantly country-rock atmosphere, with banjo echoes in the soundtrack, serving the painting of a divided America, certainly, but ultimately not so difficult to reconcile.

The fact that the option legacyquel was dismissed (Daisy Edgar-Jones and Glen Powell do not play the children, nor the nephews, nieces or any descendants of Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton) spares the film a whole lot of useless nostalgic circumvolutions. There are no relics-doudou to honor here, no stale fan-service. We will just regret that the gallery of secondary characters (Katy ” Loves Lies Bleeding » O’Brian, Sasha « American Honey » Lane, and future Superman David Corenswet as a dickhead antagonist) are somewhat sacrificed in favor of the star couple – Jan de Bont was more generous with his actors. But even the scene in a cinema (in reference to a sequence from the previous film in a drive-in where Shining) manages not to sound heavily meta, simply like a clever question, asked in passing: what can cinema do in the face of unleashed nature? Before thinking about the answer, start by holding on to your chair.

By Lee Isaac Chung. With Daisy Edgar-Jones, Glen Powell, Anthony Ramos… Duration 1h57. In theaters July 17, 2024