'Twisters' Is a Deeply Unserious Movie That Has The Audacity to Ask That You Take it Seriously

Aw Shucks! City Folk Don't Know Nothin' 'Bout Meteorology!

I have a very difficult time writing about movies that I dislike. I don’t look forward to experiencing bad movies because, much like a tornado, my motivation to articulate my thoughts and feelings just dissipates into the atmosphere. Writing about them becomes a boring chore and at a certain point, all of my ranting begins to sound repetitive and overly negative. This gets even harder when a film gives me practically nothing to work with. I don’t consider myself a tough critic! I try very hard to not allow my cynicism to overpower my sense of whimsy.

I had no such problem here.

In Twisters, directed by Lee Issac Chung, we begin in Oklahoma with Kate Carter, played by Daisy Edgar-Jones, a then-college student and storm chaser. Kate along with her friends, spends her time researching tornadoes and trying to devise a way to stop them. During one storm-chasing outing, Kate and her crew are caught in the middle of a tornado, and most of Kate’s friends are killed, save for her and fellow storm chaser friend Javi, played by Anthony Ramos.

Five years later, still shaken by the experience, Kate moves to New York City after college and lands a job with NOAA. When Javi shows up to convince her to return to Oklahoma to assist with him and his private tornado research and monitoring business, she meets popular YouTube storm-chasing sensation Tyler Owens, played by Glen Powell, and his crew. This sparks a rivalry between the educated city-slickers and the rootin', tootin' cowboy plain ol’ folk who rely on grit and gumption over fancy degrees and book learning.

These first thirty minutes of the movie are the only parts that make any sense. After that we get get film that is overly sentimental, all the characters annoying caricatures, and turns so patronizing that it feels insulting, even for a simple summer movie.

Kate decides to move to NYC after most of her friends die and gives up trying to discover a way to kill a tornado because she decides that storm chasing is actually really dangerous and kind of stupid—which, like—yeah! Who could blame her? It is dangerous and stupid!

“Well, not so fast, Kate! I'm your sole surviving friend, Javi, and I think you really ought to get back to figuring out how to kill tornadoes. Maybe God let you live so that you could avenge our friends who died because you wanted to figure out how to stop them so bad! Oh, what's that? You don't want to? Well, check out this news report about a tornado in Oklahoma that destroyed an entire town. Don't you want to help them, Kate? Huh? Don't you? You selfish asshole?”

Kate allows herself to be guilt-tripped into returning to Oklahoma to help Javi and his team of scientists and experts. There, she meets YouTube storm chaser Tyler Owens.

“Yeehaw! I’m Tyler Owens. My shitkickin' crew of storm chasers with a million subscribers on YouTube and zero fancy-schmancy degrees are gonna wrangle us up some tornadoes, woo!”

Kate, Javi, and their team dismiss Tyler and his crew as a bunch of vapid content creators while Tyler and his crew see Kate and Javi as out-of-touch stuffed shirts too interested in nerdy weather stuff to have any fun. Just when you think you’re safe to write off Tyler and his crew the same way Kate and Javi do, the movie throws in some awful, hammy details about them.

“Oh! Actually! Tyler is really smart and has a meteorology degree! And his team? Sure, they make money off YouTube and merchandising, but they use the proceeds to help tornado victims! And they drive into town to warn people about approaching tornadoes! And telling people they should find shelter! Because apparently everybody living in Oklahoma was born yesterday, has never lived through a tornado before, and doesn't have access to a smartphone in 2024!”

Why do people who reside in Tornado Alley and have spent most of their lives there need to be told by a bunch of cowboy content creators what to do when a tornado siren goes off? “Oh thank fuck you and your team showed up, Tyler 'Tornado Wrangler' Owens, to tell me that I should seek shelter! My country bumpkin-ass would have never thought of that!” For all the not-so-subtle jabs this film takes at city folk and the well-educated, it treats the people who live in these rural, tornado-affected areas with such condescension. Which the movie seems to argue—is fine, actually—if the ones doing it are a bunch of scrappy hicks in cowboy hats and denim instead of snooty New Yorkers in business casual wear.

The movie spends an excessive amount of time trying to make Tyler and his crew appear more noble in their intentions than Kate and Javi, who are gathering tornado data with the help of investment money from a real estate baron. This investor uses the data to get to tornado-ravaged areas first and offer cash for the land, giving him a leg up on his competitors. A detail that an aggrieved Tyler points out to Kate, which gives her pause.

At first glance, this distinction may suggest that Kate has lost her way and that Tyler and his team aren’t such bad guys after all, but it falls apart when you think about it for even five minutes.

In one scene when Javi correctly (if a bit rudely) calls Kate out on the real reason she went ahead with her devastating college project that got her friends killed (she wanted grant money) she goes into full denial mode. Acting like an indignant teenager at the mere suggestion that she could ever have done anything in her life that would benefit only her and not in service of a noble goal. Jesus Christ, get over yourself!

Her friend Javi is routinely depicted and made out to seem like a short-sighted, impolite dickhead with flexible morals, but he’s the only main character in the entire movie who talks with any kind of sense! Routinely having to tell Kate that—no, actually—it’s not their job to remind people to seek shelter when a fucking tornado is about to hit their town; that’s the government’s job! Reminding Kate that their goal of trying to kill tornados using Kate’s doohickey from college just might be a little bit more consequential than cosplaying as a disaster response unit.

As sleazy as the real-estate investor angle may be, it’s at least offering tornado victims a material way to rebuild their lives, more so than handing out some sandwiches and blankets in the aftermath! Kate’s work has the potential to improve conditions for people in the long run, oh but she’s an asshole because, in the short term, someone might make a quick buck? Like, huh? I thought this film was interested in practical, common sense folk wisdom instead of naive idealism. Isn’t that what conservatives hate about liberals and love to whine about all the time? Every day is Opposite Day in Twisters where the bleeding hearts belong not to the out-of-town, coastal urbanites, but instead to the rural, psudeo-conservative locals. The most annoying capital L, Liberal, could only dream of being so patronizing.

What world is Twisters living in?

Back in reality, however, it’s clear how the film engineers this angle to give Tyler and his ragtag crew something to do and appear heroic. Tyler’s team, which, consists of a videographer, drone operator, scientist, and mechanic are all one-dimensional. They offer no depth or interesting qualities. All of them are caricatures. Meanwhile, Tyler and Kate spend their time making lovey-dovey eyes at each other. The scenes between them are just straight-up boring and corny. Speaking of characters, every single one in this movie is so annoying. Don’t let my earlier defense of Kate and Javi’s motivations throw you off; they’re just as insufferable. Kate because she acts like a whiny, naive adolescent, and Javi because he allows himself to get too caught up in trying to please Kate and make her feel better to see what’s really important.

Occasionally, I would glance over to my left and right to catch people checking their phones during these scenes and found myself itching to do the same. Every moment of character exposition was dull as hell.

I know it may be hard to believe in a post-COVID world, but normal, sane people don’t generally dismiss the opinions of scientists, experts, and people who actually know what the fuck they’re talking about. Normal, sane people generally welcome said expertise and come together alongside them to figure out solutions to major problems. Twister (1996) was about the scientists being the heroes; characters motivated by a desire to better understand and mitigate tornadoes. By contrast, Twisters is very incurious about what’s causing all these increasingly devastating tornadoes to happen with such frequency. Preferring to answer that question by describing the phenomena as a “once in a generation” event instead of addressing and having a deeper discussion about the obvious elephant in the room. The film assumes that you’re too dumb to notice (or care) about that. Once again, it’s just condescension all the way down the line.

I could forgive all of this if Twisters had any actual fucking interest in just being a schlocky, summer popcorn flick, but I just could not get past how disparaging and rude it was to me as a viewer. How it demanded that I take it seriously without doing anything to deserve it. At least when I watched Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (2024) I knew exactly what I was getting into and it was also one hundred times more honest with itself about what type of movie it was. A movie that insulted my intelligence so much less than Twisters.

promises made, promises kept.

All I wanted was for the movie to get back to the goddamn twisters already! This movie was advertised with the premise being: “You thought one twister was bad? Well what about two? At the same time?!”. After all is said and done, you only get treated to two simultaneous tornadoes in the first act. The rest of the film is devoted to having the characters deal with one, though no less devastating, tornado at a time. Talk about a ripoff! Instead of Twisters, this movie should be called A Series of Twisters. This is supposed to be a dumb, fun, and cheesy summer popcorn movie, but they forgot the fun to focus on dumb.

In one scene, Tyler asks Kate: “You think I’m stupid, don’t you? Yes, Tyler, I do, but clearly, the feeling is mutual. Twisters is a film that doesn’t want to spend any time asking any important, logical questions and doesn’t want you to either. A film that doesn’t think you’ll notice or care how nothing in it makes any fucking sense at all. A film that is too confusing and tedious to be entertaining. A film that, because it’s the middle of summer, thinks it can get away with treating viewers like a bunch of dumb hogs.

A stupid film that thinks you’re stupid too.