“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!” urged King Lear, accompanied by the Fool, on the blasted heath. But that’s not quite snappy enough for the storm-chasers of Twisters as they drive their souped-up four-by-fours across the tornado-blitzed flatlands of Oklahoma. Their motto is “if you feel it, chase it!” which is pretty much all they do for the movie’s two-hour duration.
So OK, it isn’t Shakespeare, but Lee Isaac Chung’s movie, with a screenplay by Mark L. Smith, sustains a hectic and frequently hysterical pace while delivering oodles of gobsmacking footage of terrifying storms threatening to engulf both cast and viewer. It's like 1996's Twister, except it goes up to 11. Especially at an IMAX.
In the occasional brief interludes between climatic catastrophes, Chung slickly sets up his cast of characters, a motley but likeable crew of nerds, boffins, Harry Hadden-Paton as a posh British journalist, and people who look like heavy metal roadies. Though in this case the soundtrack is saturated with country songs with titles like “Stronger Than a Storm”, “Steal My Thunder” and “Hell or High Water”, since Twisters is pitching squarely at a down-home, middle-America crowd. Bob Seger’s “Against the Wind” would feel right at home.
Front and centre are the twin poles of the drama, scientist and weather-junkie Kate Cooper and daredevil You-Tuber and storm freak Tyler Owens, the self-styled “tornado wrangler” (he has the tee-shirt to prove it). Daisy Edgar-Jones plays the former with a mixture of winsome charm and steeliness, while Glen Hit Man Powell’s Tyler is a cocky gunslinger who asserts that “you don’t face your fears, you ride ‘em!” He gently mocks Kate as the “city girl” who can’t possibly understand the storm-ravaged badlands of the USA’s “Tornado Alley”.
To the surprise of no-one, Kate and Tyler gradually come to a much greater understanding as the flick’s tumultuous events unfold, and, on a visit to a local rodeo, find they have more in common than they realised (though intriguingly, the film has stirred mild controversy for its complete lack of "intimate" scenes). While Kate has a PhD in meteorology and has been working in New York, she’s really a country girl at heart and grew up in tornado-land, as her mother Cathy (Maura Tierney, from ER and The Affair) explains. “She always loved weather – the worse the weather, the happier the girl,” as mom puts it (pictured below, "you were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off").
Kate is also grappling with her painful back-story, in which her plan to test a novel method of nullifying tornadoes by firing blasts of moisture-sucking chemicals into them crashed and burned disastrously. A monster storm overwhelmed her team, and three of them, including her boyfriend Jeb, were swirled away into the wild grey yonder. She found solace in her retreat into scientific research in the Big Apple.
But she gets lured back out onto the road by Javi (Anthony Ramos), a fellow-survivor of that fatal day, who wants to test a new radar system that makes 3D scans of tornadoes. Soon, Kate’s own storm-sensing antennae are back in full working order (she’s a dab hand at staring at some distant clouds and then offering off-the-cuff analysis of stuff like moisture, wind-shear and instability). The story’s big climax arrives when a vast storm threatens to obliterate the country town of El Freno. You know it’s gonna be a bad one when a bystander confidently predicts that “there’s no tornado – nine times out of 10 it’s a false alarm.” Will our heroes be able to meet the challenge? I couldn't possibly comment...
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