TWISTERS (2024) "What About A Mutant Tornado?

How Comic Book Movies Nearly Ruined Twisters’ for Me

My son and I love disaster movies, and none more so than the original Twister with Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt. So imagine our excitement when we learned that not only was there going to be a sequel, but it would star one of our new favorite actors, Glen Powell. (I’ve loved his work since Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some.)

At the risk of spoiling the first act, this brilliant young scientist is in love, and her team is with her chasing tornadoes so she can seed them with a concoction of chemicals in barrels that are supposed to nullify the tornado. Think of all the lives that could be saved if there were an antacid for the storms on the skin of the Earth. Things don’t go as planned, and disaster ensues. The tornado is much stronger than they anticipated—end of Act 1.

So, I paused the movie and told my son, “I think she just created a mutant tornado. Whatever she put in it made it worse, and they will fight it for the rest of the movie.” That was my 15-minute prediction.

I was wrong, but I was wrong in the right way.

The movie fast-forwards a year, and a weather operations company now employs the young scientist in New York City. One of the survivors from her team shows up and offers her a temporary gig to help them track and position complex camera-scanning gear at three points around a tornado, which could grant them a CAT scan of the storm.

I thought she would discover that someone or some company had weaponized her research and was producing more powerful tornadoes on demand. Friends, as the film progresses, I was convinced of my theory because it turns out that her old teammate is working for an evil company that follows these tornadoes around and targets underinsured or uninsured homes, farms, and businesses, offering these poor people pennies on the dollar to buy up their land cheaply. Now, what better way to do that than to engineer the tornadoes and send them on an unsuspecting population? It’s the perfect villain for 2024. And I was wrong. There was no mutant tornado. Never happened. The narrative potential hung in the air after the film ended, and my son said, “Well, you were wrong.”

Superhero movies may have wrecked our ability to tell modern stories; even over-the-top disaster movies seem to need some explosive situation where “everything is at stake even beyond this storm!” Chasing after silly glowing rocks that somehow alter time and space overshadows surviving a disaster that affects thousands of people each year and is therefore much more relevant and relatable.

The final assessment is that Twisters didn’t need that evil empire shit to tell a compelling story. But for a few minutes after the film ended, I was sorry it didn’t.