OKLAHOMA CITY — Anyone who regularly reads this column (or any of my writing) knows how rarely I give an entirely bad review and how strongly I believe in being thoughtful and sometimes even forgiving in favor of entertainment value and heart.
But anyone who knows me knows how seriously I take weather science and how strongly I believe in informed caution and intelligent safety regarding Oklahoma’s severe weather.
I’d say that these two parts of me are at odds in reviewing “Twisters” – the new mega-budget disaster thriller filmed entirely in our state – but the truth is that they’re not at odds at all.
It would be a challenge for me if the film’s purely idiotic, practically fantastical pseudo-science were offset by a genuinely thrilling and engaging story or cast of characters, but it’s just not.
The story is unyieldingly repetitive and redundant, the plot is predictable down to the beat from about five minutes in, and each and every character is given exactly two gears to shift between.
It’s honestly shocking that such an inane film came from the proven talents of director Lee Isaac Chung, a filmmaker that already demonstrated a remarkable ability for not only capturing layered, quietly contemplative characters but also for the true-life experience of rural Midwestern life in Oklahoma-shot “Minari.”
The only explanation I can come up with is that Chung took this job for the sake of funding something better and more intimate in coming years. Let’s hope so, at least, because his skills are clearly too good to waste on anything else like this.
I admit I was no fan of the original 1996 “Twister” – especially given its ill-informed pseudo-science and detachment from reality – but it at least had a “dumb fun” sensibility and at least a tiny bit of heart and legitimacy to its characterization of Oklahoma.
In the new “Twisters,” even the presentation of Oklahoma itself comes across as gratingly pandering and concerned with an unearned, Hollywood hallucination of what life in the Sooner State even is.
This whole movie is Okie-sploitation, a relentless collection of “Millennial cowboy” stereotypes and “good ol’ boy” attitudes with pervasive country music and an open disdain for technology, big cities, and even an unnecessary over-the-top, posh British character that exists solely to be ridiculed.
To believe “Twisters,” Oklahoma is 100% dirt roads, rodeos, sepia-hued Dust Bowl towns, and an aggressively uninformed, ignorant population with seemingly no knowledge of tornadoes or weather awareness at all.
Sure, a lot of Oklahoma is rural, and sure, that’s where the majority of tornadoes and storm chasing will happen, but “Twisters” doesn’t seem to acknowledge that places like Oklahoma City or Tulsa even exist.
This whole movie is Okie-sploitation.
Brett Fieldcamp
That wouldn’t fit in with the film’s depiction of Oklahomans as some kind of undiscovered tribe with no understanding or warning system for their own destructive weather.
Save for one, single, unexplained mention of the letters “NWS,” the National Weather Service doesn’t seem to exist in the world of “Twisters.” There’s never a mention of a watch or a warning. No one in any town in the film has a phone alert of any kind or even seems to know that you can track weather or that storms are predicted with remarkable accuracy in the modern age.
In “Twisters,” tornadoes spawn out of absolutely nowhere, with no warning or expectation, even by the movie’s main character, Kate, who is sold as some kind of supernatural “tornado whisperer” that tracks wind patterns and can pinpoint exactly when a tornado will drop just by feeling.
And yet, tornadoes still creep up and surprise her out of nowhere numerous times like they’re the stealthy, silent killer in a slasher movie.
The storm chasers have no contact with the Weather Service, absolutely no involvement or communication with the television stations, and (except for the heartless, corporate-backed “villain” group) seemingly no access to even the most basic satellite radar imagery that we can all pull up on our phones.
Nope, in “Twisters,” the storm chasers just stand at an intersection and look at the clouds and debate which ones will drop a tornado out of nowhere, tossing terms like “cap,” “sheer,” and “velocity” around like an 8-year-old that just started watching Mike Morgan.
Both Morgan himself and Emily Sutton appear on TV screens in the film spouting nebulous conjecture about “the worst tornado outbreak in years.” But do the adrenaline-junkie storm chasers ever turn on a television or open an app to see what they’re saying when the storms kick up? No. Never. Not once.
Everyone just acts dumbfounded about how and why the storms are getting worse and more numerous every year.
Is there ever even so much as a single mention of climate change? Absolutely not.
Instead, the chasers are each obsessed with their own, profoundly dumb objectives.
Glen Powell’s reckless redneck heartthrob is intent on driving directly into and inside the tornadoes to launch fireworks from inside the vortex for YouTube content, legitimately the most infuriating and irresponsible thing this movie has to offer. Expect to see at least a few idiots die trying to recreate it.
In fact, the number of times that characters drive straight up to and inside tornadoes with nothing to protect them but their own tenacity is mind-boggling (and mind-bogglingly stupid.)
The well-funded, high-tech villain group, meanwhile, is trying to set up planted, stationary 3D image modelers in a triangle around a (still moving!) tornado to create “the best scan ever made of a tornado.” Why that would be helpful in any way is never explained.
The tornadoes in the film, by the way, all seem to move at about 10mph, even all the countless destructive EF4s and EF5s spinning at 200mph or more.
And then, of course, if you’ve seen the trailers or commercials, you know that Daisy Edgar-Jones’ protagonist, Kate, is developing a way to seriously stop and collapse a tornado in its tracks.
Her plan utilizes “superabsorbent polymers,” a very real substance that can absorb hundreds of times its weight in water and moisture. She plans to launch a few hundred gallons of the stuff into a tornado to suck up the moisture inside and kill the twister as if it were the shark in Jaws.
Superabsorbent polymers do exist, but they also result in either a fine, non-melting snow-like powder that would fly out of a collapsing tornado and bury an entire town, or in a thick gelatin that would presumably fall out of the sky and crush a building or two.
The greatest insult comes at the climax when a gigantic destructive twister is bearing down on the town of El Reno, the same city that suffered the wrath of the largest tornado ever recorded just 11 years ago, resulting in eight deaths, including three beloved storm chasers.
Allegedly it was meant as some kind of homage, but given that the real people were killed in a nightmare scenario that so closely resembles what the characters in the film continuously do for fun, it just feels offensive and in terribly poor taste.
As someone who takes this subject very seriously and who wants to see an ever-greater level of respect and understanding paid to our real severe weather, please do not see this film in theaters.
We can’t afford for there to be any more sequels to this idiocy.
“Twisters” opens in theaters nationwide on Friday, July 19th.
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Brett Fieldcamp has been covering arts, entertainment, news, housing, and culture in Oklahoma for nearly 15 years, writing for several local and state publications. He’s also a musician and songwriter and holds a certification as Specialist of Spirits from The Society of Wine Educators.