If you think my usual movie entries suffer from subjectivity, don’t expect an exception here. The original Twister holds a special li’l place in my heart for a variety of reasons. Its director Jan de Bont, fresh off the Speed race, was also the cinematographer on my all-time favorite movie. My mom was (and is) a big fan of disaster films, which had a sort of Golden Age in my childhood, from the natural terrors of Earthquake to the man-made systemic failures of The Towering Inferno, The Poseidon Adventure, Airport, and more. Along a more sensitive vein: in the darkest month of my life, pop culture manifested two welcome distractions to take my mind off my anguish when I needed that most: Rhino Home Video’s very first wave of Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes on VHS, and Twister hitting theaters. Setting my baggage aside, their timing was perfect, as the latter would make a great episode of the former.

Fast-forward 28 years and here we go again with Twisters! They’re back, and this time, they’re even windier. My stress levels aren’t as off-the-charts as they were in ’96 (well, as of this minute), but looking around me, I can’t say the same for the rest of the country, if not the world. Leave it to Lee Isaac Chung, director of the 2021 Best Picture nominee Minari and that season-3 hour-long episode of The Mandalorian that focused on reformed Imperial aide Dr. Pershing, to bravely decide it’s time again for humankind to pull together for a shared experience that’s not great, not terrible, just unapologetically crowd-pleasing and thrilling and extremely loud and filled with scenes of unironic smiling…well, when Mother Nature isn’t trying to murder everyone.

Per the noisy blockbuster playbook, Twisters‘s inclement action leads off with a tragic flashback, wherein we meet Daisy Edgar-Jones (Where the Crawdads Sing, Under the Banner of Heaven) as a college-age storm-chaser named Kate, who’s part of a project to measure a whirlwind using a “Dorothy” canister full of gyroscopic sensors, the only original Twister cast member to return for the sequel. After things go horribly wrong for her science-buddy squad, five years fly by and she’s still in the meteorology biz, but as a behind-the-scenes number-cruncher, no more fieldwork because Painful Memories.

Then along comes a fellow survivor of said Painful Memories: Anthony Ramos (Hamilton, In the Heights) as auld acquaintance Javi, who’s put together a new storm-chaser team wielding doctorates, 4K cameras, cutting-edge sensors for measuring wind aspects that probably didn’t exist back in ’96, and a deep-pocketed sponsor to fund their every scientific whim. Javi wants to reteam with Kate and make her wildest dream come true: discover the cure for tornadoes. He endures several rounds of rejection before she relents and offers him one week’s field consultation. Had she kept her “no” final, the rest of the film would’ve been two hours of back-office calculus and polishing anemometers, and aired only on Apple+.

Same as with Twister, a pack of rival storm-chasers horns in on their tornado turf. Whereas Twister had the Britishly pale Cary Elwes as an underhanded glory-hound whose intuition fatally fails him, Kate’s opposite is a hunky YouTuber out of Arkansas named Tyler Owens, played by America’s new cinematic heartthrob Glen Powell. He has everything a modern daredevil could possibly need: A tech-savvy crew! An all-terrain mega-truck tricked out with select Batmobile gizmos! YouTube ad revenue! A cool hat! Tyler is the rootin’-est, tootin’-est, glute-inest, foolhardy, built-hearty thrill-seeker east of the Pecos! And he’s got catchphrases! He’s meme-ready with cocky bon mots such as “If you feel it, chase it!” and “You don’t face your fears…you ride ’em.” (That one actually works against some fears. Exhibit A: spiders. Next time one corners you, try sitting on it. Your results will be so empowering!)

And yet…he isn’t a bully competitor. He reins in his smugness when kindness is needed. He doesn’t rage when he’s been one-upped. He and his clingy shirts have the brawn, but he’s also got the brains to grapple with the science. Kate lets him get under her skin because her Painful Memories demand she treat all this as Serious Business, but he isn’t even trying to irritate her. He’s a scalawag with a heart of gold. You know he’s definitely okay once you realize not once does he call himself an “influencer”. He’s just a supernaturally dimpled Good Ol’ Boy rough-ridin’ his 2024-model truck while basking in flattering camera angles and more honky-tonkin’ country-rock singles than any secular film released this century what made over five million at the box office. One backing track even sounds like the “Canyonero” jingle, as befitting his implausibly heavy-duty wheels.

First time I ever noticed Powell was in the 2016 Best Picture nominee Hidden Figures, where the fresh-faced stranger beamed for quick moments as astronaut John Glenn, vouching for anti-racism and giving a thumbs-up to the historic Black women who were the film’s main subjects. I didn’t belabor his presence much in my entry, but his curiously charismatic smile and easygoing, old-fashioned movie-star confidence stuck out within that minuscule screen time just enough for me to theorize I’d see him again someday in bigger things. I wish I’d written that down so I could quote myself and yell “I TOLD YOU SO!” at the internet and hope the echo reflects something besides indifference.

Since then he’s partnered up with his forebear Tom Cruise in Top Gun: Maverick, played humble second-fiddle to Jonathan Majors in Devotion, and most recently co-wrote and starred in Richard Linklater’s Netflix dramedy Hit Man, where his guy’s-guy chops belie some comedic skills in the role of a police-sting consultant who dons numerous identities and accents to entrap would-be assassin-hirers. Whether his rise to stardom is calculated or deserved, he’s convincingly magnetic, but what’s most shocking is he’s second-billed. It’s a shame, then, that Edgar-Jones can barely stay in frame with him. In Under the Banner of Heaven she held her own against a Wyatt Russell/Sam Worthington tag team and then some — I half-expected her to wrestle them both to the ground — but here she’s a top-billed stick-in-the-mud foil who has to learn to love again, or at least recover her moxie and start punching tornadoes in their faces again.

Not that it matters! Let’s not lose sight of the whole point of this endeavor. Much as Chung might have us admire their budding friendship (to the consternation of pro critics who demand more sex in movies now now NOW) or have us gaze in quieter moments upon the duality of nature’s wonders versus nature’s fury, it isn’t about the will-they-or-won’t-they, or about Creation’s pastoral wonders. It’s about them twisters. In a world sorely needing nonpartisan villains, one mutual enemy we can all root against is uncontrollable killer weather. For good measure there’s also one (1) greedy businessman, but he’s such a thin insertion that he’s more of a literary symbol of profiteering than a fully formed character.

As foreshadowed by the ‘S’ stolen from James Cameron in the title, Twisters contrives a whole herd of fears to ride, as a TV weatherman announces a TORNADO OUTBREAK! Sky-high air-titans inspired by real-world tribulations loom and shred and overshadow and pulverize and roar with all the kaiju-throated decibels a Dolby Cinema sound system can handle. Sometimes they’re sneakier creatures than the TORNADO OUTBREAK of 1996 — skies will be crystal blue one minute, all pretty clouds stretching to the horizon, then seconds later SURPRISE TORNADO! Skies blacken in an eyeblink like a Star Destroyer exited hyperspace right in our atmosphere and blotted out the sun. Sorcerous teleportation might explain how the weatherman’s televised pleas, all but begging Oklahomas to go live underground for a few weeks, go unheeded and not a single event is canceled or at least stations any staffers to watch the skies. A street fair, a Little League game, an entire rodeo — apparently all their offscreen managers pounded their fists on the nearest table and proclaimed, “THE SHOW MUST GO ON!” with all the hubris of the mayor of Amity, only to suffer swarms of blackened murderstorms zapped in from the nearest James Whale monster-movie dimension. When they do arrive — same as the last movie — those fierce gales are fickle about which humans and structures will get power-vacuumed and demolished, or which ones will improbably live to tell the tale.

Chung tries to avoid some predictability in this area. Not every deserving jerk is yanked into the air like a rag doll and flung into Nebraska. But if you’ve seen the first one, you’ve seen every tornado power-move. A couple variations don’t quite count as new tricks. Using Lost World one-upmanship math — i.e., what must be more terrifying than a T-Rex? Two T-Rexes! — yields the novelty of twin tornadoes, but their combined might feels no scarier than just one, and forfeits the potential advantage to flank any prey. The showiest specimen is saved for the “climax” (read: the last storm before the storms randomly stop, though doesn’t really feel like the Storm to End All Storms) when an ostensible F16 or whatever overtakes an entire oil company or power plant or furnace factory or something and suddenly it’s FIRENADO! IT SPINS AND IT BURNS! WHO NEEDS SHARKS WHEN YOU’VE GOT FIRENADO! Which should lead to way more Rube Goldbergian town-leveling chain reactions than it does. The final boss battle cranks up all the things and adds a conceptually boo-able element when it dares threaten a movie theater, the high temple of this very medium. NOBODY STEAMROLLS A THEATER IN TYLER OWENS’ AMERICA!

Twisters is kindasorta more of the same as Twister, yet suitably disaster-flicky, with explosions and CG airborne tonnage and mighty deathblows to heartland infrastructure and so on. It’s a well-meaning caricature of the classic humanity-v.-nature struggle for a new generation, only some of whom are vaguely aware that tornadoes have been around a while. (A single line of dialogue starts to invoke climate change topicality, only to pivot mid-sentence into existential concern over another nonpartisan villain: inflation.) Chung has fancier blockbuster equipment than de Bont did in his day, yet also brings a poet’s sense for flashes of eye-of-the-storm quietude, like a gossamer piano solo in a scene of dandelion divination.

But the best weapon in Chung’s arsenal is that canny choice of a leading man who can balance retrofitted yesteryear aw-shucks charisma with modest wild-west gumption. Tyler Owens never truly rides an entire tornado like a bucking bronco, but they had to save something for the next sequel. Or maybe, like Benoit Blanc, he can rise above the one adventure and star in sequels pitting him against other natural phenomena. Maybe promise us during the end credits, “TYLER OWENS WILL RETURN IN VOLCANOES!”

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Meanwhile in the customary MCC film breakdowns:

Hey, look, it’s that one actor!: Tyler’s team includes Brandon Perea (Jordan Peele’s Nope), Katy O’Brian (The Mandalorian, Quantumania), Sasha Lane (Hearts Beat Loud, Marvel’s Loki), and, as the token elder over 35, TV on the Radio frontman Tunde Adebimpe. At their side is Harry Hadden-Paton (The Crown‘s Martin Charteris, Downton Abbey‘s Bertie Pelham), invaluable comic relief as a British journalist doing a ride-along for his paper back home, in way over his head and unprepared because the UK never has tornadoes ever since the Queen banished them.

Javi’s rival team includes Steven Oyoung (For All Mankind, John Wick: Chapter 3) and David Corenswet, our next big-screen Superman, who comes across as a glowering, all-business version of Captain Awesome from Chuck. Kate’s OG storm-chasing crew from the prologue includes Kiernan Shipka (Mad Men, Sabrina).

NewsRadio‘s Maura Tierney enters late as Kate’s Concerned Mom. Comedian Paul Scheer (last seen as a Star Wars pundit in A Disturbance in the Force) clocks in at the end as an airport curb-cop.

One easy-to-miss nod to the original Twister besides Dorothy: James Paxton — son of the late, great Bill — has one scene as an obnoxious motel guest who’s more worried about lousy customer service than the coming storm he denies is right there.

How about those end credits? To answer the burning question that MCC is always happy to verify: yes, there is indeed a short scene during the Twisters end credits. For those who couldn’t hold on another 90 seconds into said credits and really want to know…

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[…insert space for courtesy spoiler alert in case anyone needs to abandon ship…]

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…for the crew’s next video, Boone is shooting footage of Kate and Tyler on the roof of his mega-truck, making much needed gizmo repairs. Fully aware she’s about to be YouTubed, Kate asks if they’ll also be making T-shirts with her face on them. Boone says he’d wear one. Tyler tells him he’d better take that back.

The end credits also confirm the bulk of the film was genuinely shot in Oklahoma, not in Vancouver or Atlanta, to take full advantage of the Filmed Oklahoma Act of 2021. At least one added scene was done in Wales, but mostly they stuck to Oklahoma because who pays extra to watch Welsh CG tornadoes in Dolby Cinema?