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There is a moment toward the end of Twisters where a group of people are sheltering from a tornado in a cinema. The 1931 version of Frankenstein is playing on the screen until the wind tears it and the wall behind it away leaving a huge hole in its place, exposing the cataclysmic storm outside. Where the people had been watching one movie they are now watching the same filmic spectacle that we are.

There’s a lot in this scene. First off it references a real-life incident in which a tornado partially destroyed a movie theatre in Mayfield, Kentucky in 2021, photos of which went viral. It also riffs on the drive in cinema that gets torn apart while showing The Shining in the original Twister film. The choice of a classic monster movie being shown is significant too as this new film plays out like a monster movie more than it does a disaster flick. The twisters of the title definitely appear to be in a fight against the human characters more than the weather was in The Day After Tomorrow, the volcano was in Dante’s Peak or the quake was in San Andreas. In this respect it mirrors Jaws with its use of hurricanes more than any of the Sharknado movies ever did. In a simpler way this sequence might also just be saying that good cinema has the power to ‘blow you away’.

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Even without all of this though it is a nice visual metaphor; a way of directly framing this as a cinematic spectacle by literally placing the proscenium arch briefly around the action like in the beginning of Moulin Rouge or Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina. As an image it definitely appealed to the movie geek in me and I liked it lot.

Fortunately Twisters is more than this one shot though and as a straight movie fan the rest of it appealed to me a lot as well. It is just a great entertaining movie. It has solid writing, strong characterisation, great action sequences and a compelling (if slight) story. It may be that it caught me in the right mood but I really enjoyed it.

Technically this is a legacy sequel to the 1996 Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton movie but the destruction of another cinema screen aside, doesn’t lean on references to the film it follows as much as similar sequels do. The Dorothy scanner device from before does make an appearance but it fits narratively rather than being shoehorned in, and Bill Paxton’s son has a cameo but mostly this is just another story in the same vein, and a better story at that. This one follows Daisy Edgar Jones’ Kate as she returns to field research with twisters five years after circumstances drove her away. In doing so she reunites with Javi, played by Anthony Ramos, and meets a gung-ho storm chaser called Tyler in the shape of Glen Powell. In a switch from the 1996 movie we are on the side of the corporate research team and the ramshackle crew are the antagonists (there are these plot comparisons but again they feel perfectly organic) but one of the engaging things about the film is how it plays with this idea of good chasers and bad chasers. Powell’s Tyler is quite unlikeable at first but just like in Top Gun Maverick, his character (essentially the same character) comes good at the end.

This film plays with the Wizard of Oz more in its naming of things as well. Further to the aforementioned Dorothy device we also have chaser teams called Lion, Tin Man and Scarecrow. Beyond this there are thematic allusions as well with the idea of there being no place like home featuring quite significantly.

The big draw of Twister was the Twisters and while Twisters doesn’t depend so heavily on this, neither does it disappoint. The storm sequences are great but crucially remain totally people centred. Of those people Kate is the most rounded and Edgar Jones owns this film with her lead performance. Downton Abbey and The Crown’s Harry Hadden-Paton appears as the stereotypical buttoned down Brit but nothing stays buttoned down in a tornado so we get past this too.

It could be argued that the end, or the final battle with the monster as it were, is a little far fetched with the science getting lost in the wind along with everything else but I actually liked this. It felt a bit old school in its movie making approach, where someone has a crazy idea to beat the odds. In fact the whole of this film feels like a throwback to thirty years ago, before cinema became too knowing, and it is this that it takes from the 90s more than anything else. In the end, more of a remake than a sequel and one that improves on the original.

Ultimately Twisters didn’t need that late scene to remind me that I was in a cinema because I know exactly that this is the one place that I can have this kind of fun.

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