The Twisters

The-Twisters
The Twisters

If you offered a bet on who would make the most fun blockbuster since 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick, no one would have thought that it was Lee Isaac Chung, the filmmaker behind the 2020 flick Minari, the soft indie film about a South Korean family migrating to Arkansas to farm. The serene, poetic aesthetics of the film Minari struck chords with several critics and was nominated for the Best Picture award at the Oscars in 2021. For myself and many others, that movie was a beautiful balm to the brutal torments of the dark pandemic days (as we mentioned in Episode 5 of the 3 Brothers Filmcast).

Yeah, but Twisters is also this new aesthetic that came as an ‘after-injection’ or part two of whatever Maverick brought into the theatres in the summer of 2022. This Top Gun sequel, Joseph Kosinski’s Top Gun: Maverick, nearly single-handedly salvaged the summer movie season and reminded audiences that uncomplicated but well-crafted blockbusters have their place on a big screen. Chung’s Twisters ups the ante, and it looks like viewers are appreciating it, with Twisters earning more than $ 80 million on its first weekend in North America. Kosinski actually gets the story credit here since he was the one who suggested a sequel to the original Twister, but Chung deserves most of the credit for his direction because he shocked us by being completely in charge of this massive production.

It appears that there is no going back for Chung, who directed Chapter 19, The Convert, which is the third episode in the third season of The Mandalorian and also served as a learning experience in the area of visual effects.

The setting behind the tornado’s twisters is a movie night dominated by the loud voices of fans. They are even joined in the movie screen responsible for the ginormous narration of the destruction of a town to concentrate on a small fictional community employing bravado as a shield for vulnerability. At this point, Chung can’t help but return to discussing the plot of the film, and the residents are also helpless against the terrifying wind approaching the barren building with people inside. There, the scene can be viewed analogically as cultural criticism, but it also alludes to the second part of the film that depicts a tornado overhead the audience inside of a drive-in “theater” set at midnight. The film being watched is in southern America around the mid-90’s

Although this film features most of its characters in a non-linear plot format, fuck must be a stand-alone sequel, these moron fans didn’t show up when this moron film’s plot hinged on Helen and Bill, for some explored, and then thrashed chrysalis for some reason, making this chronology finer for fans offering a reminder of nostalgia. Because the created movie where nostalgia governs the setting provides a naturally developed culture of referencing other pieces including themselves, it always tacking them in. Those fans where those minor artists are also scattered across this work in various structures.

In quite a cheeky turn of events, James, Bill Paxton’s son, appears as one of the frustrated, over-enthusiastic motels and fires up some of their shut-in clientele (the logic of any disaster movie wants to call it this). There is sensor technology from the original research team’s movie in evidence, and we also come across other new technology also, based on The Wizard of Oz. While Dorothy I- IV were the most essential tools in the production of the first film, here research teams are equipped with large portable scanner pads that are designated Lion, Tin Man and Scarecrow.

In line with the existing plots of the two films, the screenplay by Mark L. Smith appears to feature inclusions and deviations from the earlier works. Just like Jo played by Helen Hunt in the film, Kate played by Daisy Edgar-Jones sounds traumatized by an allergic tornado, specifically in the opening scene. However, always on the run from her trauma, as Jo was, Kate has pulled back after the disaster of the experiment. Old friend Javi (Anthony Ramos) calls her to Oklahoma for a week to work on his tornado project that was only just begun. There they will meet the outrageous Tyler Owens (Glen Powell), who calls himself a “tornado wrangler” and earns money with videos on YouTube.

Tyler and his crew including drone pilot Sasha Lane and videographer Brandon Perea’s rather wild approach propose to drive a truck into the tornado, then strap it down with a makeshift anchor and twister like a cowboy bull. The additional actors do not outmatch the old pictures, but they are all young and promising, among others writer Tunde Adebimpe of the TV on the Radio band.

Experimental research is being conducted by Kate in which she aims at completely collapsing a tornado by using absorbency polymers used in diapers. The crew that works with Tyler appears a bit detached, as they do everything for money, fame, and thrills, which clashes with the research team’s motives. But Gary Oldman’s antagonist in the first film isn’t fully interchangeable with Tyler though Chung and Smith take the story to dark places I refuse to reveal, they are not the two-dimensional bad guys of the original film. However, the tornado filling the picture is an enthralling reality, one that’s hard to surpass, as was the case with the stressful scenes of Tyler and his crew smashing into tornadoes to recording country music. There are moments in Chung’s film when Tyler’s photographer was in front of the camera and Chung wanted to merge YouTube aesthetics with blockbuster level expectations and the effect within the art form. In other words, what exactly is the 2024 definition of realism?

Let’s not forget that Glen Powell is quite popular thanks to the movies Top Gun: Maverick and Twisters. This spring, Arena praised the work done by this very actor when he directed Hit Man. Powell was the perfect person to act as a performer in Maverick, however, he stands out best here in which more dimensions are added to his character when he is an alpha male.

There exists an air of authority and a certain level of intelligence, a certain creativity, within him. But he can act as well before proceeding to show a range of emotions towards Daisy Edgar-Jones, who co-leads with him. It is time for America to have its own movie star.

The story confirms that Chung is indeed the right man for the role. He is a native of the rural parts of Arkansas. Chung’s thoughts are evident in the images, whether it is cowgirls with US flags, or Kate’s nightmare, as we see the golden wheat fields spinning like a tornado or extensive and disintegrated storm shots. In other words, among Chung’s close observations of details, as well as of the bigger picture, there is also a history and a love for Middle America. The film does not represent Oklahoma in the typical ‘fly-over country’ manner, nor does it ridicule the blatantly ignorant Americans. So when the script has Tyler preferring Kate not to be a city girl as it is obvious she has moved to Oklahoma from New York City, the understanding is actually reversed. She was born in Oklahoma and only went to the East Coast after the overwhelming situation explained in the first part of the film.

Edgar-Jones is convincing as the co-lead and with time, she becomes even more appealing. However, Kate’s trauma subplot is quite lackluster when compared to Kate and Tyler’s tension-turned-flirting. Kate is never dismissed as a mere love interest and, precautionarily, neither is Edgar Jones and Powell’s romance, which is essential for the film’s purpose. The ending of the scene is a typical Hollywood fantasy for Tyler, who reminds us that YouTube subscribers should ‘If you feel it, chase it.’ There are moments when Kate’s trauma nearly borders on the artificial and is too functional but the film completely refrains from lowbrow moments in the romance and relies on the strengths of the leads and their interactions instead.

Twisters are in constant struggle: the struggle between the need to master nature and the need to surf its currents. Life is full of strange wonders: the mechanics of human attraction, the whirlwind of multiple causative agents of tornadoes, and the wish to exercise control over the world. This very wish can be most fronted in the film with the desire to bring down a tornado. Tornadoes are terrifying phenomena wreaking havoc upon cities and innocent people, but do we really want a society where people have the power to control the weather? Through the eyes of Kate, running away from all the possible aspects of life and staying cocooned in the semblance of safety does not appear to be appealing. Is there really an equilibrium to be reached, or is Twisters nothing more than a whirlpool of heady emotions and concepts, like most of the other cinematic endeavors coming out of Hollywood today? I cannot say, having watched it once, but it seems to me that the film is serious when Tyler mentions that tornadoes represent one-half science and one-half faith. Chung is strikingly successful in eliciting a couple of instances of sheer delight at the myriad facets of love and nature from the background of the technical might across the span of the blockbuster.

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