'Twisters' Is This Year's 'Top Gun: Maverick' (And Not Just Because Glen Powell Looks Hot in Both)

The "summer blockbuster" is a label that is often aimed for by movie studios but rarely attained. For every Jaws or Jurassic Park you get dozens of movies like The Flash, Haunted Mansion, Blue Beetle, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, or Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (all of which underperformed last summer alone btw). It's hard to make a genuine four quadrant hit and even harder to do it without being a franchise tentpole. Just look at the biggest summer movies from years past. The last piece of original content to win the summer box office was Finding Nemo in 2003. We are, however, living in a beautiful resurgence of the summer blockbuster. Last year Barbie and Oppenheimer each cleared the $1 billion mark with mostly original ideas, cruising towards Oscar nominations. The previous year Top Gun: Maverick accomplished the same feat. Now in summer 2024, Twisters deserves to carry on that mantle. The standalone sequel to 1996's Twister is one of the best movies of the year and warrants the money and Best Picture nomination that befits its quality.

Of course the original Twister is the Helen Hunt/Bill Paxton disaster thriller penned by Michael Crichton that follows a pair of exes/storm chasers around Oklahoma as they hunt for tornados. The sequel, set in modern times with a completely new cast, has basically nothing to do with the original other than its plethora of tornados taking out rural Oklahoma towns. While Top Gun: Maverick at least kept on Tom Cruise, Twisters, written by Mark L. Smith, steers clear of the past, opting to skirt even cameos from the originals stars. Instead the casting director seemingly copy and pasted a "Rising Stars" list from The Hollywood Reporter onto the call sheet and relaunched the franchise with soon-to-be A-list talent.

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Rising Star #1, Daisy Edgar-Jones (who you may remember as Irish in Normal People or with salon-chic swamp girl hair in Where the Crawdads Sing) stars as Kate, a meteorology super nerd who is obsessed with tornados and possesses an almost supernatural/Delphic Oracle-like connection with nature. The movie opens with Kate exercising her weather prophetess abilities and leading a group of fellow storm chasers towards a tornado. Their goal: deploy a chemical compound into the heart of the tornado to kill it (I can't even begin to explain the science here, so don't ask). Of course, following a long tradition of disaster movies, the opening sequence quickly lays waste to her crew which includes her boyfriend (Rising Star #2 Daryl McCormack of Good Luck to You, Leo Grande fame) and two sidekicks (Rising Star #3, Mad Men's Kiernan Shipka and Rising Star #4, Atypical's Nik Dodani). Only Kate and Javi (Rising Star #5, In the Heights actor and most importantly, the ex of the illustrious Jazzy Jones, Anthony Ramos) survive.

Cut to five years later and Kate has followed the long-held tradition of traumatized midwesterners: she's moved to New York. After approximately 30 seconds of cajoling, however, Javi convinces Kate to return to Oklahoma to work alongside his corporate, capitalist storm chasing entity Storm Par to do scans of tornados (sure, science). Storm Par, after all, needs a weather-predicting witch to help them identify where tornados are gonna touch down.

Upon arriving in Oklahoma, Kate meets Javi's robotic (and obviously evil) business partner Scott (Rising Star #6, Ryan Murphy groupie and future Superman, David Corenswet) and immediately tumbles into a rivalry with Arkansas YouTuber/storm chaser Tyler Owens (Rising Star #7 Glen Powell of Top Gun: Maverick, Anyone But You and the criminally underrated Scream Queens). Tyler and his crew (including Rising Stars #8-10, Brandon Perea, Sasha Lane and Katy O'Brian) want to set of fireworks into the tornado, which obviously pisses Kate off. As these enemies-to-lovers stories tend to go, however, Kate at some point during her "Tornados in Six Acts" journey realizes that she's working for a ruthless real estate overlord trying to buy land from tornado victims on the cheap while Tyler is actually trying to do some good in the world (even if he is being annoying about it). Along the way, of course, we get twin tornados, a fire tornado, the afore-mentioned fireworks tornado, and of course a big bad EF5 headed straight towards an unsuspecting town mid-farmer's market.

The genius of Twisters, however, is not that it's doing anything particularly groundbreaking. It's not. It's more or less giving us an action adventure/disaster romance we've seen plenty of times before. The genius is in how exactingly perfect the execution is. And with that I credit the Oscar-nominated writer/director of Minari Lee Isaac Chung. Like The Woman King, Top Gun: Maverick or Mission: Impossible - Fallout, Twisters is the best the genre has to offer.

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The film is sleekly plotted with plenty of entertaining set pieces that slide into one another seamlessly, yet stay distinct. All six tornado sequences are somehow uniquely thrilling, and there are just enough deaths to pack a punch without it getting too grizzly. The characters are deftly written so that we know EXACTLY who they are in seconds, without them feeling like stereotypes. That's a feat nearly impossible without sharp writing and superb, empathetic performances. Harry Hadden-Paton's British journalist, Maura Tierney's farm mom and the approximately 700 storm chasers are all somehow specific. Kate and Tyler's romance unfolds in a way that's believable with a perfectly calibrated amount of cheesiness. ("Let's go to the rodeo, and I'll tell you about my first tornado.") My only qualm there is that we don't get a kiss, but I'll forgive Chung if we get a sequel (for which I have an idea.)

The visual effects are well executed and augmented by strong practical effects and storm-ravaged sets. The props department makes everything feel lived in (looking at you Little House on the Prairie box set in Kate's bedroom), while the costume department makes everyone realistically grungy hot. The stacked original country music soundtrack makes every scene pop. (Think The Black Panther soundtrack if it was made by white people in Tennessee.) Twisters deserves at least a half dozen Oscar nominations including ones for Best Picture and Best Original Song.

Twisters is better than Twister and better than most other movies that have hit theaters this summer. If I could prognosticate on the trajectories of films like Kate can storms, I'd blow a dandelion into the air, slowly turn, start sprinting to my car and shout, "We've got an EF5 hit coming our way!"

Grade: A

Next, Everything You Need to Know About the New 'Twisters' Movie