Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.The first surprise of Twisters is that it exists at all. On any list of things you didn’t know you needed, a place would surely await a reimagining of Twister, the 1996 disaster movie produced by Steven Spielberg that stalked Oklahoma with killer tornadoes. The second comes in the credits. Three decades ago, the director was action wild man Jan de Bont. Now the gig goes to Lee Isaac Chung, acclaimed for Minari (2020), the gossamer tale of a Korean family in 1980s America. There delicate drama sprang from a perennial herb. Now Chung makes a sequel to a film most famous for a flying cow. Don’t expect more surprises. The movie is a blockbuster of a familiar kind, a theme-park ride built on the destructive power of nature. No shade implied. Jaws changed American cinema by being just that. And Spielberg’s classic may come to mind as we get started here. In place of foolish young night swimmers, Chung opens with fresh-faced meteorologists on the southwestern plains, led by twister savant Kate Cooper (Daisy Edgar-Jones). The mood is peppy, but not for long. An outsize tornado soon claims a body count.Deadly force established, the story arc sees ever larger articles sucked up and wrecked, from single trees to major infrastructure. Years later, a psychically wounded Kate returns to Oklahoma. By now, storm chasing has become a lucrative business, embodied by a brash YouTuber, Tyler Owens (Glen Powell), viewed with distaste by our heroine. Coming after his star turn in Richard Linklater’s Hit Man, the role marks the latest phase in Hollywood’s frantic attempt to make Powell happen. (At Twisters’ London premiere, his Top Gun: Maverick co-star Tom Cruise turned out in support, like a proud parent at a school play.) Accordingly, he is only briefly allowed to act the heel, before we learn he is, in fact, a rodeo-trained Robin Hood, out to shield Oklahomans from devastation. Kate reappraises. Love blooms between the debris. The screenplay is by Mark L Smith, homaging the Hollywood science of the 1996 script co-written by the late Michael Crichton. Good-looking actors speak urgently of firing sodium polyacrylate into the vortex. You may find the weather has been too clearly cooked up at effects house Industrial Light & Magic. Still, if actual suspense is rare, the execution is nifty. Once or twice, the movie even sprinkles something like wonder over the spectacle, the camera gazing up through the maw of a tornado to a snatch of blue heaven. Earlier, for just a second, grass quivered nervously. The friend I saw the film with archly wondered if that was the Lee Isaac Chung moment for which the director had been hired. Slowly, though, his involvement makes more sense. After all, Minari too was a story rooted in flyover America, with rural lives wedded to a rich but volatile landscape.As in 1996, the film is a balancing act. Backers Warner Bros will hope what sold tickets then still does now, a big-screen orgy of mayhem, whose update with 21st-century technology gives Twisters a reason for being.But mixing gleeful thrills with earnest concern for flattened townspeople was always tricky. Now the task is only more complex. The storms are getting worse every year, it is said. Yet for all the Crichton-esque language, the phrase “climate change” never comes up, presumably judged too politically loaded to say out loud. The lesson is clear. Making blockbusters in 2024? A risky science indeed.★★★☆☆In UK and US cinemas from July 19
