Here’s everything worth knowing about the Twister(s) universe.
Twisters is (are?) coming. Not, God willing, to New York but to a movie theater near you, thanks to a hotly anticipated follow-up to the 1996 ensemble thriller Twister. The new movie, directed by Lee Isaac Chung and starring Glen Powell and Daisy Edgar-Jones, is widely being referred to as a “stand-alone sequel,” which means it takes place in the same universe as Twister but isn’t too closely linked to it beyond that.
You might be wondering if you need to catch up on the original movie before watching the sequel, and I’m here to tell you: Even if you haven’t seen Twister, you will understand Twisters perfectly fine. There’s no real canon, no character overlap, and no inside jokes that will go zooming over your head. The two movies share some basic plot DNA: Ambitious female scientist with tornado-based trauma and her handsome love-interest-slash-sidekick gather a motley crew to chase storms, do science. Beyond that, they don’t have much in common besides their Oklahoma setting and, of course, their shared enemy (tornadoes).
That being said, there are some Twisters moments that will be more fun if you’ve seen the movie’s predecessor, which is one of the campiest installments in the otherwise bleak genre of disaster movies. You should definitely go watch Twister immediately, but if you hate good advice and would rather not spend 113 minutes catching up, here’s everything from the first movie worth knowing before watching the 2024 installment.
What do I need to know?
First, a Tornado 101 according to the Twister universe. In the movies, tornadoes hit really fast — like, get-the-fuck-underground-when-you-feel-a-light-breeze fast. As Dr. Jo Harding, Helen Hunt spends all of Twister talking about how she’s dedicated her career to increasing tornado warning time from three minutes to 15 minutes. Doesn’t seem like a major change to me, but Jo says it could be huge for the midwestern towns that get ravaged by these natural disasters. Based on what happens in Twisters, no one has listened to Jo’s research in the past 30 years. Yikes.
Another thing you may find helpful to know from the first movie is the scale they use to measure the intensity of a tornado. In both movies, an F1 is your normally terrifying tornado, the kind that our storm-loving scientists can safely chase and study. (Well, relatively speaking.) An F5 is a God-tier, house-snatching, life-shattering tornado. In the first movie, Jo is the only character who’s even seen an F5 — it killed her father, setting off a lifetime quest for vengeance on … wind, I guess? But they seem to be a little more common in the sequel, global warming and all. (The U.S. has actually not seen an F5 tornado in ten years, but we don’t need to get into that here.)
A nerdy side note: In real life, our present-day crew should technically be calling these things EF1s, EF2s, and so on — the F-scale, short for Fujita (the name of the guy who came up with it), was decommissioned in 2007 and replaced with the Enhanced Fujita Scale. But for consistency’s sake, F1 will do just fine.
Anything less nerdy I should know about?
The only thing that is kind of canon in the Twister(s) universe is niche tornado tech. Twisters’s opening scene shows a group of young researchers using the technology that Jo and her ex-husband, Bill (Bill Paxton), came up with in the first movie: a giant vat of orb-shaped sensors with little metal wings that the scientists release in the path of a tornado to get whipped up in the vortex. The sensors take measurements from inside the storm and feed those to a computer in a van, whose lucky driver is parked at a safe distance from the storm.
As established in movie No. 1, the big vat of sensors is named Dorothy. Know that this second installment will be adding more Wizard of Oz–inspired storm-tracking gadgets to the arsenal. Apparently, something I have in common with Oklahoman weather researchers is that we all love a cinematic wink-wink.
How did Dorothy get from Twister to Twisters?
It’s unclear how our new crew of storm-chasers got their hands on Dorothy, which appears to be the exact same sensor tub that Jo was using in the ’90s — the buttons are faulty and old as hell. Again, I take this to mean that Jo’s groundbreaking tornado research didn’t go nationwide, increasing tornado warnings from three minutes to 15 minutes. Depressing! What’s not depressing is that our bright young scientist Kate (Edgar-Jones) appears to have been inspired by Jo’s design, because she, too, is using big-ass vats to house her special tornado tech. Women supporting women waging war on wind.
Do Twister and Twisters have anything else in common?
Twister is sprinkled with little cinematic nods that you may see traces of in Twisters — one scene in the 1996 movie, for example, shows a drive-in movie playing The Shining get gradually ripped apart by an unexpected tornado. Just … keep that in mind.
So why is Twisters called that?
This is the question that keeps me up at night. Both of these movies take place during a rash of tornadoes, plural, in Oklahoma. Both of them show scenes involving multiple tornadoes. There is absolutely no reason why Twister should be in the singular and Twisters should randomly have an “s.” I am forced to conclude that this is some weird IP dispute that got hashed out in a deep, dark cavern of the Warner Bros. HQ. If you have spies in Hollywood, please reach out.
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