Despite its capacity for immeasurable destruction, there’s something gorgeous about nature’s fury. That intoxicating beauty, adrenaline, and danger propelled Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton’s characters Jo and Bill Harding in 1996’s Twister, and it’s what drives the new generation of storm chasers played by Daisy Edgar-Jones, Anthony Ramos, and Glen Powell in its sequel, Twisters.
The original Twister had about eight rip-roaring tornadoes, enough to float a cow and tumble houses for Jo and Bill to drive through. Twisters tries to up the ante with more firepower, sometimes literally, with its own spectacles of whirling flames and imperiled livestock. But how do the new film’s wind funnels stack up against each other? Destructiveness seems like the obvious grading scale, but we’re not the National Weather Service, so we’ll evaluate our twisty twisters by impressiveness, flare, and awe factor. As Powell’s YouTuber–storm wrangler Tyler says, “You don’t face your fears, you ride ’em.” Well, I’m just going to write them. Let’s rank some ’nadoes.
Pathos Tornado
Like Twister before it, Twisters starts with devastating loss. New protagonist Kate (Edgar-Jones) chases a seemingly low-stakes tornado to test out her theory to tame it. (The science behind her theory, you ask? Keep asking.) She quickly realizes she’s facing a monster of a windstorm, leading to the deaths of her friends, including a boyfriend. The tornado lives up to its EF5 stamp. But with all the rain it produces, it’s basically unseeable, and it mainly serves to set up Kate and her capital-J Jamie Lee Curtis trauma.
Fireworks Tornado
Five years after the EF5 disaster, Javi (Ramos) — Kate’s one other surviving team member and the current owner of his own storm-chasing outfit — lures her back into the field. There, she meets the storm-chasing cowboy and YouTuber Tyler (Glen Powell), and the two camps race after this skinny queen of a tornado. She swirls cutely and produces mass amounts of hail, but her coolest moment involves Tyler popping fireworks in her — get your head out of the gutter.
Science-Fair Tornado
While at home, Kate rediscovers her middle-school science-fair project, a diorama of a town complete with an at-home twister. She only activates it for a minute, but it’s way better than any science-fair project I’ve done. The baby twister spins wisps of white smoke and knocks over some other baby houses. It’s controlled chaos at its cutest, honestly.
Grand-Finale Tornado
The last tornado of Twisters is an absolute diva. And she loves a costume change. This tornado warps from a fidgety, smokelike storm into a fire-breathing terror as it hits an oil rig. The moment actually would’ve been way cooler if it weren’t revealed in the trailer. But the physicality of the tornado swallowing up the fire — and blowing it out until the flames completely choke — earns it massive points for originality. And that’s not even the end! The tornado morphs again to give us the real finale, a spinning top of pain that rips up a lot of a small town and even a movie theater — this is why box office is struggling! I leaned up in my chair and held my breath. All that said, the tornado loses a lot of its flare when the fire suffocates. I suppose Kate couldn’t save the day by driving into an inferno. But then again, Jo and Bill did drive right through a flaming truck in Twister. Whatever happened to riding your fears?
“TWINS!!”
A twofer, folks! Twister had triplets, but Twisters stuck with twins. Fewer ’nadoes doesn’t mean any less fun, though. In fact, these tornadoes produce one of the more exciting chases of the movie as a single cyclone splits into two, forcing Kate and Tyler’s two groups of storm chasers to choose the one they think is better. The twin tornadoes dance together and split apart, but Tyler’s team picks one that soon evaporates, while Kate’s reaches the one with the juice. Chickens (not cows) are mauled — the Chick-fil-A agenda is strong.
Rodeo ’Nado
By making Tyler a roguish cowboy who slings T-shirts with the phrase “Not My First Tornadeo,” a sequence of a rodeo being ravaged by a tornado had to bring the goods. This one surprise-attacks as Kate and Tyler are trying to flirt up a storm and watch some steers buck. Alarms go off, and I don’t know how anyone could’ve made it out in time as the tornado rapidly evolves into a tempest that swoops everything up with a quickness. Animals gallop for their lives (still no flying cows that I could see), people hide in pools, and there’s even a tornado denier — like, you live in Tornado Alley, my girl???
Dreamy Tornado
I can’t stress enough how elegant this tornado looks. We’ve gone from the most terrifying storm of the film to the loveliest. I call this girl the dreamy tornado because director Lee Isaac Chung worked some of his magic here. This tornado came after Kate’s escape home to regroup, where she and Tyler think they’ve figured out her whole tornado-taming idea. The two drive after her amid shots of rolling clouds and musings on why they chose this work. It drives home the whole innate beauty in absolute danger theme. If Twisters marketing weren’t, naturally, trying to shout, “Hey, this is a natural-disaster movie!” with its big muddy tornadoes, this tornado should’ve been on the poster. She’s the Grace Kelly of twisters.
