Crafting an entertaining summer spectacle entertainment is no easy task. You have to make it big and bold enough to engage the masses but have it not insult their intelligence at the same time. Lately these attempts at blockbuster filmmaking have been falling flat for me with a few exceptions but I still had hopes for the latest entry Twisters. My hope was this would be this year's Top Gun Maverick in taking a property from the past and elevating it to something even better. Unfortunately my hopes were dashed by a film that's answer to having lead characters that are scientists is to make everyone else unreasonably stupid. I know that many will be able to not care about the characters or the story and just 'have fun' with this one but it pushed me beyond what I could tolerate.
The opening sequence for Twisters is probably the most compelling part of the film as Daisy Edgar-Jones' Kate faces an intense E5 tornado with tragic consequences. This then gives the motivation for Anthony Ramos' Javi to hunt her down and bring the tired veteran back into the tornado chasing game. All of this is by-the-numbers but executed pretty well.
My main problem is the way that basically everyone but the scientists and storm chasers are portrayed. You are supposed to believe that in Oklahoma at the height of tornado season when towns are being wiped out that a giant tornado comes towards a town and nobody is bracing for impact. Nobody is in shelters? No. They are outside playing baseball and hanging out. It's absurd. The same thing happens when a giant tornado comes through a nearby town but they are still having the local rodeo despite strong chances of another funnel cloud heading their way.
When I was a young adult I lived in Indiana as a missionary for my church. While there we had a mild tornado that caused some damage including destroying a neighborhood church. Being newcomers we didn't know the protocol and stayed out in the rain way longer than we should have (see photo above.) Everyone told us 'get inside!' and then we made a few calls and people told us to stop doing that because we could get electrocuted through the phone line if it was struck by lightning. Nobody was hanging out and playing baseball with a severe tornado warning.
There is one character in the film that says '9/10 times the warnings are wrong' which could exist for a single character but not whole gatherings and towns. Come on... Even a stupid blockbuster needs some kind of grounding in reality.
I also had issues with the group of chasers as well. Glen Powell is very handsome but he was also rude and careless for so much of the film I found him hard to warm up to. Ramos is fine but everyone around him including David Corenswet are laughably bad men of business with their greedy capitalism that it's impossible to take any of them seriously.
If you want to treat Twisters like an amusement park attraction and not care about characters, story or tone I suppose there's some fun to be had there but is that enough to sustain an over 2 hour experience? It's certainly not enough for this critic. So unfortunately Twisters will have to go down as another disappointment from 2024. It's a real bummer but we push forward to the next blockbuster ever hopeful the light will come through the storm of mediocrity at the cinemas...
Frown Worthy
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