Look! Up on the movie screen! It’s a sequel! It’s a reboot! No, it’s TWISTERS. Twenty-eight years after the singular TWISTER blew into our cinemas, TWISTERS (plural) has arrived. Less of a sequel than a reboot, this new film features an all-new cast that is still trying to figure out how those whirly storms work. Though the technology to analyse them has improved since 1996, the tornadoes are stronger than ever and there’s more of them. But let’s not mention “climate change” so as not to offend the deniers who might want to pay money to see this movie. You know who I’m referring to.

PhD student and Oklahoma native Kate Cooper (Daisy Edgar-Jones, WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING) is studying the effect of using sodium polyacrylate, the stuff found in diapers to absorb liquid, on tornadoes to suck the moisture out of them. Along with four fellow storm-chasing students that include Javi (Anthony Ramos, IN THE HEIGHTS; HAMILTON), they head out to find a small tornado that will pass over the Dorothy V, their machine that tracks the movement of tiny GPS-enabled weather sensors that are filled with the chemical. What they find, however, turns out to be an EF5 and their experiment is a failure that results in the loss of life. Fast forward five years and Kate is now a meteorologist based in New York tracking storms. One day, Javi pays her a visit to tell her that he’s started a company that is using new army technology that has the ability to do 3D imaging of a tornado. He convinces Kate to join his team down in Oklahoma for a week and she agrees. When she gets there, she meets Tyler Owens (Glen Powell, HIT MAN; ANYONE BUT YOU), a cocky but highly successful storm-chasing social media personality. Like the tornadoes Kate is tracking, Tyler is not what he appears.

If you know even the slightest bit about science, you’re going to be scratching your head a lot while watching TWISTERS. It is loaded with illogic and crazy, made-up stuff what will, no doubt, get Bill Nye offering up his two cents worth at some point. I’ll start with the polyacrylate-filled weather sensors, which have some weight to them. When you’re dealing with wind speeds of 100 mph and more, you don’t want to be anywhere near those things when the tornado starts spitting them out because they’re going to be lethal. If golf ball-sized hail can shatter car windows, these will obliterate them. Then comes Javi’s 3D tech, which requires three radar transmitters to be set up within 300 meters around a tornado with the third one being set up ahead of the storm. First, tornadoes don’t travel in straight lines. Second, tornadoes typically travel 10 to 20 mph, and sometimes as much as 60 mph. By the time the third transmitter has been set up, that baby has moved and is probably already out of range of the first two transmitters. Third, it’s never made clear what advantage Javi’s tech offers. All it seems to do is give a 3D image of what a tornado looks like. Gee, who could have guessed that a tornado looks like a funnel? Then there’s Kate’s model that Tyler uploads to a supercomputer somewhere that is connected to the cloud. Yeah, right. Finally, there’s the new and improved Dorothy. I’m not going to get into this one because that would be a spoiler but all I’ll say is that Kate must have both an AMEX card and an incredible supply chain. The only real science I heard in the movie comes when Tyler mansplains to Kate that the EF rating system is based on how much damage a tornado does, as if she wouldn’t already know that. (Yes, I know that was for the audience’s benefit.)

Leaving the weird science aside, the story has a lot of heart to it, and that probably has plenty to do with director Lee Isaac Chung (MINARI), who grew up close to Tornado Alley. Unlike TWISTER, the characters in TWISTERS are very socially conscious. Whenever a storm hits, or is about to hit, Kate, Tyler and Javi want to go and help the people who are impacted by it. That’s so sweet. I don’t recall Helen Hunt’s or Bill Paxton’s characters exhibiting the same amount of caring until a tornado flattened her aunt’s house. Where Chung slipped up, though, is with his use of music, which was completely unnecessary, and his sound design. I remember when TWISTER came out, there was so much press about how sounds like the roar of a lion and the woosh of a jet engine were combined to give life to the tornado. If there was any of that in TWISTERS, I didn’t hear it. Loud, yes. Discernable, no.

The performances here are all serviceable, although Powell, who just oozes charisma, overshadows the film’s intended star, Edgar-Jones. The film still above says it all. WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING was supposed to be her big breakout role but that didn’t happen even though the film did very well at the box office. This film will do well at the box office too, but it won’t do much for her marketability. As for Powell, who seems to be doing no wrong as far as his career goes, women, and probably more than a few men, will be very happy to see him wearing a plain white t-shirt in the rain.

All in all, TWISTERS is a perfectly fine summertime film but if you’ve already seen TWISTER, this one’s not nearly as good.

TWISTERS opens in Hong Kong today (July 18^th) and around the world tomorrow.

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