Twisters looks bad, and I’m upset

It’s the Super Bowl, and that means we’re being inundated by all sorts of commercials and trailers for stuff we didn’t know we needed. One such trailer is the one that just dropped for Twisters, the sequel to the 1996 Jan De Bont-directed, Michael Crichton-written natural disaster movie starring Helen Hunt, Bill Paxton and Cary Elwes.

Uhhhhh….

Look, I really liked the first Twister. It spurred a drive in me to become a meteorologist when I was a kid before I learned the sheer amount of math involved in that pursuit. I think it’s an excellent 90s disaster movie. I also have a deeper and more nuanced appreciation for the work that tornadogenesis researchers do, and the risks they actually take, after living in Oklahoma for the better part of two decades. I also have a much better understanding of what storm chasers (which are often a distinct group from researchers) do, the safety precautions you should take if you’re caught out in the open in a storm, and the real-life effects of these storms. I was cautiously optimistic about a sequel, but after seeing this trailer? I dunno.

The trailer opens on a Toyota 4Runner hauling a trailer bed full of 55-gallon drums and a familiar-looking cylindrical piece of measurement equipment into a torrential downpour. The camera cuts to the driver’s seat, a scared-looking Anthony Ramos (playing a character named Javi) looking around at the worsening weather. In the passenger’s seat: Kate Cooper, played by Daisy Edgar Jones, looking just as upset about the situation as he is. Something big hits the windshield, driving them off the road. Behind them, a rain-wrapped tornado is bearing down, sucking their car roughly into the maelstrom. They have mere seconds to get to safety, so they… run for a nearby overpass.

From the National Weather Service in Wichita, KS:

Many people mistakenly think that a highway overpass provides safety from a tornado. In reality, an overpass may be one of the worst places to seek shelter from a tornado. Seeking shelter under an overpass puts you at greater risk of being killed or seriously injured by flying debris from the powerful tornadic winds.
Tornadic winds can make the most benign item a dangerous missile. In addition to the debris that can injure you, the winds under an overpass are channeled and could easily blow you or carry you out from under the overpass and throw you 100s of yards.
As a last resort, lie flat in a ditch, ravine or below grade culvert to protect yourself from flying debris. If no ditch is available, you may remain in your vehicle, put on your seatbelt, lower yourself below window level, and cover your head with your hands or a blanket.

This may seem like a slight error, not worth nitpicking. After all, even NWS-Wichita acknowledges “many people think” this is fine. But I’m already thrown! These folks are tornado researchers! What are we doing!

Cut to an overhead shot of a gas station next to some grain siloes. A beat-up Dodge RAM with a cast-iron longhorn (with a tornado replacing the bull’s head) welded to its grill pulls into the parking lot. If there’s one thing Oklahomans love more than hiding from a twister under an overpass, it’s longhorns! This is the truck of Tyler Owens, AKA “the Tornado Wrangler (Glen Powell, Top Gun: Maverick).” He lives by the credo “If you feel it, chase it!” We seem to be setting up a reverse dichotomy from the first movie, which set Bill Paxton’s Bill Harding up as the instinct-following, dedicated-to-academia “Extreme” versus the corporate-sponsored, empirical-data-driven Jonas Miller (Cary Elwes); this time it’s the young data-driven academics trying to learn from the corporate-sponsored instinct-following influencer.

We get a shot of Owens drilling some anchors into the soft Oklahoma clay as a tornado bears down, followed by some Go-Pro shots of the inside of the cab, meant to mimic shots from the Discovery Channel-produced reality/documentary series “Storm Chasers,” starring Dr. Reed Timmer and his “SRV Dominator.” Owens and crew are hooting and hollering; the truck’s windows don’t even look reinforced lmao.

We then cut to maybe the stupidest line of dialogue I’ve ever heard: “You thought you could destroy a tornado?” Owens asks Cooper. “We never even had a chance,” she replies. A pause. “You want one?” Owens says.

Man. What the fuck are you talking about?

Tornadoes are no joke. This is something I thought the first film understood really well, and something that has only been reinforced over the decades since it came out. There’s a scene where the whole crew is seated around Aunt Meg’s dinner table eating T-bones and eggs, and they’re talking about the size of the storm they just encountered along with an explanation of the Fujita Scale, and Bill’s soon-to-be ex-girlfriend, sex therapist Melissa, asks: “Is there an F5?” The table instantly goes silent. She looks around like she said something wrong. “What… would that be like?” she asks. One of the other chasers, Preacher (played by Scott Thomson) looks at her and says solemnly: “Finger of god.”

At around six o’clock in the evening on May 31, 2013, a series of mean supercell thunderstorms, the type of storms that tornadoes are the most likely to form in, barreled over the Central Oklahoma plains west-southwest of El Reno, OK. These motherfuckers were slow, churning behemoths whose sheer size caused an abnormal amount of atmospheric instability that in turn affected their predicted movement paths. It was the explosive finale of a several-day-long tornado outbreak in Oklahoma, and over the next 40 minutes or so, the storm generated the widest multi-vortex tornado ever recorded (2.6 miles wide) with the second-strongest-ever wind-speeds ever recorded inside the cone (306mph). The storm tore through mostly-unpopulated prairie, though it was bearing down on Interstate 40 during a Friday rush-hour traffic jam that was exacerbated by residents of Yukon and other towns in the path trying to escape the storm.

Four storm chasers were killed by the tornado: Tim Samaras, a veteran self-taught engineer, his son Paul and friend Carl Young, and local resident Richard Henderson. Several other chasers were injured. It has become known as the most dangerous tornado ever in the storm chasing community. Eighteen other Oklahomans lost their lives and over 150 others were injured in the storm. Considering that rush-hour traffic situation and the proximity to the Oklahoma City metro, the death tolls could have been so much worse had the storm not dissipated 16 miles from where it first touched down. It was, without hesitation, a finger of god.

I only bring this up because it feels exceptionally weird (and tbh kinda bad!) to be watching a trailer for a Twister sequel that feels like a fan version of Ghostbusters: Afterlife.

After this inexplicable chunk of dialogue we get your standard Hollywood-movie-ass supercut of action scenes, like a tornado ripping up a wind turbine farm, a really poor-looking supercell threatening a softball tournament, a long shot of a tornado emerging from a wall cloud in otherwise blue skies, and an excited scream: “We got twins! Twins!!” before seeing a carbon-fiber drone buzzing into the path. There’s more but you get the idea. Shit sucks!

I feel bad for being so down on this project, which was shot at local Prairie Surf Studios as well as on-location at various spots in Oklahoma and seemed to have the enthusiastic support of the local filmmaking community. But I just don’t feel up to watching an unnecessary, mindless sequel to a movie that already got it right.