Welcome to the movie reviews section of the site!
This is where my moview "reviews" (probably more accurately descibed as ramblings that resemble reviews)will go. I am in no way a critic or in any other way qualified to review movies, but here we are.
I will have links to the reviews in the body of this page once I have enough to make that viable. In the meantime I'll simply review a movie so the page is not empty.
Twisters: "If you feel it, chase it!"
WARNING! This review contains spoilers for Twisters. Proceed at your own risk!
The original Twister is a movie that is near and dear to my heart. When I was a little kid, just starting to form an interest in weather, there was no film that had the same impact. If I didn't want to chase the Finger of God before hand, I sure did after watching it. I've seen it countless times and know most of the dialogue by heart.
Imagine my surprise and excitement, then, when it was announced that we were getting a sequel. It was pretty unexpected, to be frank, as the original is nearing 30 years old and both Bill Paxton and Phillip Seymour Hoffman had passed in the time since. Without them, any sequel was either going to have to explain their absence and focus solely on Jo or face the daunting task of telling a totally new story, one with little connection to what made the original great.
Twisters took the latter approach. Rather than focus on the original cast, the sequel features an entirely new cast of characters, with only the slightest of connections to the original in the form of Dorothy V. We follow Kate Carter, a young meteorolgist from Oklahoma who suffered the tragic loss of her team and her lover while attempting to "tame" a tornado by releasing water-absorbing polymers into the funnel, Tyler Owens, a popular and charismatic viral chaser, and Javier "Javi" Riviera, the only member of Kate's team to survive and the current leader of a groupd of scientists hoping to get a 3-D scan of a tornado.
Since I don't want this review to be simply a plot summary with commentary, I'll focus on particular scenes and moments I like, as well as comment on the scientific accuracy (or inaccuracy) of the film and how it relates to the original.
Scenes/Plot Discussion
The opening scene where Kate loses her team, including her partner, is brutal. The realistic depiction of the rain-wrapped EF-5 is hands down the scariest moment in the film, no contest. Not even the massive tornado in El Reno at the end is quite as terrifying as the monster you can't see, in a situation with no good options. It does a great job of establishing Kate's personality and the trauma that her character arc centers on.
Later in the movie, after Kate has agreed to return to Oklahoma with Javi and has met his team (Storm PAR), we are introduced to Reed Timmer Tyler Owens, our films equivalent to Bill Harding. He and his crew roll up the gas station that Storm PAR are grouping up at, with Luke Combs a-blaring and a crowd of people a-swarming. Immediately, I recognized Tyler and his crew as a sort of pastiche of Dr. Reed Timmer and his crew, down to the tornado-resistant vehicle, drone coverage of storms, and a dedicated handheld camera man in the main truck. The film seems to almost condemm the actions of Tyler and his crew at the start, characterizing the shenanigans of the self-proclaimed "Tornado Wranglers" as both dangerous and lesser than the purely scientific approach of Storm PAR. To be frank, I was concerned that this would be the central confilct of the movie, a commentary on the current state of storm chasing and the ways it had changed since the original. Instead, after a tornado hits the town of Crystal Springs, the film does a 180. It is shown that despite the high-adreneline nature of Tyler's chasing and his tacky merch shop, he genuinely cares about the people the storms affect. His crew brings food for the town, paid for by the merch store, and Tyler actively digs through rubble to find someone's lost dog.
In the same scene, a new and much more original conflict emerges: who, exactly, is funding Storm PAR and what are their motivations? Tyler calls out the fact that Storm PAR is funded by a wealthy land magnate. This magnate, as it turns out, swoops in after the storm has passed and offers to buy the land the destroyed houses are on from the wounded and dazed for low but tantalizing prices for his own monetary gain. This is unfortunately highly accurate to the reality we live in and the very real problem of realty firms buying land for cheap after natural disasters, from those who are the most vulnerable. The discovery of this drives a wedge between Javi and Kate and leads to her leaving Storm PAR.
Shifting away from the land conflict for a minute, I'd like to discuss Kate's trauma. Losing so many close friends and her partner in the opening has clearly scarred Kate deeply, not unlike the scars left by the most damaging tornadoes.Throughout the film, we see her slowly but surely come to terms with her past and personal guilt. She runs away from the first tornado Storm PAR gets the chance to intercept, and the tornado at the rodeo in Stillwater clearly shakes her as well. After leaving Storm PAR, she returns to her childhood home and the barn in which her research project was housed. When Tyler, having pieced together who she is and what has happened to her, shows up at the barn and begins to read her research, we get what is in my humble opinion the film's best scene. Kate lets her guilt and trauma out, leading Tyler to respond with a comparison to the EF-scale and how a tornado is only judged by the damage it causes, not the size or the windspeed measurements.
This review is under construction. Check back later!
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