Twisters
This tornado-focused thriller combines optimism about environmental issues with a wariness of big business’s response to them.
Please support my work by becoming a free or a paid subscriber to the newsletter. Paid subscribers can access my full archive of posts at any time, and are vital to me being able to continue producing and expanding this newsletter.
This post is part of the regular ‘One Take’ series analysing the politics of a film currently showing at the cinemas.
Content warning: Bereavement.
Note: Given that, at time of writing, Twisters is still showing in UK cinemas, this analysis only lays out as much of the film’s scenario as is necessary so as to avoid spoilers. It is therefore suitable to be read either before or after watching the film, while hopefully still enriching the viewer’s appreciation of it either way.
A distant follow-up to 1996 disaster movie Twister, Twisters centres on aspiring Oklahoman meteorologist and storm chaser Kate Carter (Daisy Edgar Jones). She is researching into the possibility of halting tornados in their tracks by propelling a super-absorbent polymer into them to alter the atmospheric conditions they thrive upon, but abandons these ambitions after an experiment goes badly wrong. Five years later, Kate is working for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in New York when Javi (Anthony Ramos), a former member of her storm-chasing team, makes contact with her. Javi persuades a reluctant Kate to temporarily return to Oklahoma to help him in his new venture, ‘Storm Par’, deploying triangles of high-tech scanners around tornadoes in order to get a three-dimensional picture of their internal dynamics.
Javi’s faith in Kate’s instincts is not shared by his highly credentialed team of experts, least of all by Javi’s business partner Scott (David Corenswet). She also encounters, and is initially contemptuous of, a rival team of storm chasers comprising the so-called ‘Tornado Wrangler’ Tyler Owens (Glen Powell), videographer Boone (Brandon Perea), drone operator Lily (Sasha Lane), scientist Dexter (Tunde Adebimpe), and mechanic Dani (Katy O’Brian) – and accompanied on this occasion by British journalist Ben (Harry Hadden-Paton).
Tyler’s team seem wholly unserious in their objectives, competing with Storm Par to find a major tornado, only so they can film themselves driving into and launching fireworks into it. However, in the aftermath of one such destructive storm, Kate comes to realise the far more altruistic motives of Tyler’s team, as well as the far less scrupulous ones of Storm Par’s business backers. This shifts the dynamic between Kate and Tyler, as well as between her and Javi, and also compels Kate to face her past.
Twister and Twisters
Save for the tornadoes, there are no characters from the original Twister in Twisters, despite earlier reports indicating the film would centre on the daughter of the original’s protagonist couple, Jo (Helen Hunt) and Bill Harding (Bill Paxton). Both Hunt and collaborator Daveed Diggs have stated that their initial proposal to make a version of the film with an all-Black and Brown team of storm-chasers was nefariously blocked – although an element of this vision survives in the final film, as discussed further below.
Twisters does, however, feature plenty of nods to its predecessor. There is the Oklahoma setting. There is a reference to the ‘Dorothy’ technology that Twister centred on. There is the prelude of a traumatic experience by one of the film’s protagonists, which explains her motivations, just as with Jo’s childhood loss of her father to a tornado at the outset of the original. There is the love triangle between Kate, Tyler, and Javi, just as there was between Jo, Bill, and Melissa (Jami Gertz) in Twister. There is the pitting of a highly ramshackle outfit against a far more professionalised one – only in Twisters we are initially introduced to the latter rather than the former. There is a parallel between Jo’s Aunt Meg (Lois Smith) and Kate’s mother, Cathy (Maura Tiernan), as a key matriarchal figure. There is even a cameo by James Paxton, son of the late Bill Paxton, as a motel guest with skewed priorities.
A sequel for the climate crisis?
So what does it mean to make a follow-up to (or reboot of) Twister in 2024? The original film was made in a decade of heightened environmental consciousness, of awareness of global warming, but also a post-Cold War optimism in humanity’s capacity to tackle it through cooperation and scientific advancement. A pre-teen viewer like myself had already grown up on a staple of cartoons like Captain Planet, which told us we could protect the environment by recycling used items and not leaving lights on when we left a room.
While that was a deeply relevant context in which to make a film about tornadoes, Twister was unconcerned with the idea of them as a product of environmental change. Rather, they were characterised as an exciting but frightening recurring feature of life in the Central US, and Dorothy – based on the TOTO technology developed in the 1980s – was a scientific tool of progress: a capsule containing small weather sensors that, deployed in a tornado, could provide a much clearer picture of how they functioned as a weather phenomenon, facilitating the development of a more effective early-warning system that could save lives.
Thirty years on, general optimism about anything, let alone the climate crisis, is thin on the ground. Yet Twisters is no more concerned with the – admittedly still only partly understood – relationship between climate change and tornadoes than Twister was. The film’s director Lee Isaac Chung insisted he did not include any references to climate change in the film because he does not feel films should be ‘message-oriented’. There is a plain-speaking homily by Cathy that hints at the general effects of environmental change on everyday life, as well as a nod to the dangers of climate denialism when one character foolhardily dismisses a tornado warning as a false alarm. However, the description of the series of tornadoes in the film as ‘once in a generation’ also echoes Twister’s conceptualisation as recurring, with occasional infamously destructive outliers.
There is also an evident continuity between the technological solutions offered in Twister and Twisters, and the logic underpinning them. Storm Par’s objective is to provide an even better picture of the internal workings of a tornado than Dorothy was able to, ostensibly to further diminish their impact. Kate’s vision goes further still: to not just anticipate, but neutralise bad weather as it occurs. This is explicitly linked to an actually existing form of weather modification, cloud seeding. In this regard, it taps into a broader stream of wishful thinking on environmental problems: that with individual bravery and invention, the right technologies, and the right intentions, we can overcome them without having to alter broader patterns of human and economic life.
Science, business, and populism
Nonetheless, alongside this techno-optimism, there is also an anti-corporate, egalitarian populism at Twisters’ heart, which also recalls its predecessor, though it takes a while to show its hand, concealed within an apparent technocratically liberal facade. Javi – played by an actor of mixed racial heritage – seemingly epitomises the latter quality. Since his earlier storm chasing days, he has had a stint in the military, a signifier of multicultural meritocracy, where he had encountered and obtained the technology necessary for scanning tornados. His Storm Par team, with their uniform dress and vehicles, their PhDs from elite universities, backed with finance from major businesses who also have an interest in addressing the problems caused by tornadoes, seem to epitomise a marriage between the scientific, military, and corporate worlds, unified in pursuit of a common good. Yet it becomes clear that there are contradictions in this alliance that Javi has to navigate, as there is as much money for businesses to make in the advent of tornadoes as there is in their mitigation.
Compared to the seriousness of Storm Par’s mission, the tongue-in-cheek self-aggrandisement and clownish thrill-seeking of Tyler’s team seem at face value to signal badly warped priorities, bearers of a mission whose success is measured not in data accumulated nor lives saved, but in YouTube hits and merch sold. Yet we also learn that there is a humanitarian ethos to their brand of commercialism, that this multiracial group may not possess the impressive qualifications of Storm Par’s personnel, but they do have a diverse range of skills beyond their exuberance and buffoonery, reminiscent as it is of Jo’s unassuming band of storm chasers in Twister. In this regard they are a much better stand-in than Storm Par for the melting pot, egalitarian, well-intentioned nation. This blend of performative flair, authenticity, and applied intelligence is especially encapsulated by Tyler himself, an Arkansan rodeo rider turned science grad.
Kate straddles these two worlds and she is the vehicle through which we learn more about them both, and through those encounters we also learn more about her. There are clearly strong parallels between Bill in Twister and Kate here: a natural storm chaser hiding away from who they really are, away from the field where they are really in their natural habitat. At first it seems that it is Javi, a figure from her past, haunted by the same tragedy as she is, who will reawaken her true sense of self, win her over to his mission, and draw her back to where she really belongs. Yet the stark contrast between her instinctive, folksy methods and the high-tech professionalism of Storm Par rather shines light on the tensions in who Javi is and what he is trying to achieve.
Rather, it is through Kate’s encounter with Tyler, half-amused by her apparent city girl uptightness, half-intrigued by her aptitude for tracking tornadoes and by her surprising wiliness, that she really becomes her original self again. It is through meeting him that she not only returns to the field, but also reconnects with Oklahoma as a place, returning home to her mother’s farm, to the barn where she once engaged in much more improvisational, original, radical scientific research. She and Tyler also share an understanding of tornadoes as both a cause of harm to the ordinary people of small-town America, with whom they have a natural affinity, and as a sublime, almost living component of the prairies of the central US. It is in this way that Twisters brings together its different ideological strands: its admiration for scientific ingenuity, its scepticism of big business, its affinity for the rural environment, and its advocacy of a vaguely progressive type of heartland populism.
If you’ve enjoyed this post, you can also show your appreciation by sharing it more widely, recommending the newsletter to a friend, and if you’d like, by buying me a coffee.