Human judges can show mercy. But against the laws of nature, there is no appeal.
—Arthur C. Clarke
Kerosene to feed the flame
Your effect is quite the same
Shadows dancing on the wall
Waiting for the sky to fall
—“A Tornado Warning,” Turnpike Troubadours
Prelude to Howling
The summer’s biggest blockbuster hit the small screen this month, brought to you by the National Weather Service, diapers, and Glen Powell’s pearly whites: Twisters is on the Cock. You can now watch Lee Isaac Chung’s tale of tornadoes and those who chase them from your very own couch. Pop popcorn and put on your best poncho. Storm’s coming, and Mother Nature ain’t one for being tamed. Pecos Bill’s a fraud. Wrangle at your own peril.
I. Ill-Natured
At first it’s just grass and sky. The pasture’s a supreme green. Lime blades arc into a fractured sky busy with clouds. Variants of charcoal bend and curl, grays on grays. Some sprays of light leak through the silver, but the sun will have to wait. The heavens are smoky and alive. Something furious stirs. This is Twisters. The sky’s gotta eat.
The Oklahoma of Twisters is tormented by a “once in a generation” outbreak of tornadoes. Every day the sky falls. Usually more than once. Clouds come down and scrape the ground, make death and debris, and that is that. The storm stops when it wants to. People have no say in the matter. Something about nature—it doesn’t lose.
This is a spiritual sequel of sorts to the less pluralized 1996 movie Twister, but Chung’s film goes its own way. No characters or surnames return. Daisy Edgar-Jones’s Kate is not Helen Hunt’s daughter. Glen Powell’s Tyler is not Bill Paxton’s son. He is not Todd Fields’s nephew, Alan Ruck’s brother, or Jami Gertz’s shithead cousin.
There are some ties. We’re back in Jedland, where waving wheat sure smells sweet and kaleidoscopes are not to be trusted. We get a reference to the suck zone. We get a Dorothy. We get Powell driving a tomato-red Ram 250 that looks a helluvalot like Hunt’s old pickup. Unfortunately, we do not have anyone operating on the sartorial levels of Philip Seymour Hoffman, but that’s true of the rest of the Western canon.
Respect the king. He’s a wonder of nature, baby. Bow down, twisters.
Twisters is Chung’s first film since the much-loved Minari. His secret weapon for this movie and one of his great gifts as a filmmaker is that he knows a good prairie sky when he sees one. He was raised on a farm in Arkansas and stared into them; he knows the ways they flex and glow and scowl and roll, knows the way they strut. He understands if you give clouds enough elbow room, they’ll make something majestic—a gargantuan canvas on which he can paint with a wide brush. Chung’s skies contain multitudes. They are huge and alive, fullmouthed and head splitting, bringing terror and beauty. Chung shot the movie on location in Oklahoma, and it’s the moments with the actors in the pastures where that pays off the most, the sky roiling and beasting overhead, making them small. There are fields of green and red dirt, too. Chung makes them boom, for me and you.
“Al Nelson, Bjorn Schroeder, the guys at Skywalker, they gave these tornadoes not just a technical realism, they gave them artistic expression,” Chung said. “The things that Al was doing, he was adding in the sounds of wolves howling. That was something he wanted to do to make the tornado feel alive and have its own individual voice.”
Terms like absorbent sodium, polymers, and Lagrangian mechanics combine with other science-adjacent words to convince the viewer they’re about to watch a ragtag bunch of college kids collapse an act of meteorological terror so uniquely strange that even today we don’t understand how they’re actually formed. But Edgar-Jones and her team have something tornadoes don’t—cutting-edge, state-of-the-art diaper tech. The plan is to release barrels full of some kind of Pampers cocktail in the hope that it soaks up the moisture and puts the kibosh on the tornadoes. I don’t know, man, it’s a movie.
“The birth of that last tornado, it’s supposed to feel like Frankenstein coming alive,” Chung said. He studied Jaws extensively during prep, and you feel it when you watch the storms descend. Huge and dark and out for blood. Gray behemoths stomp into town, hunt, eat whatever’s in their path, and hope those stupid yellow barrels don’t ruin their good time.
II. Adrenaglen
Put on your best white T and take a walk in the rain. Make your chest known, your abs, too. Give the fabric a workout. Carry waterproof outerwear, but don’t put it on. In the next scene, wear it inside. Keep us guessing. Make no sense. It’s not like the world does.
Not since Mad Men has a Glen had this kind of heat. The 36-year-old Texan’s a relatively new leading man, but he’s been in Hollywood for a while. Denzel convinced him to move to Los Angeles after Powell one-take-wondered a scene in Washington’s The Great Debaters. Powell’s first movie was Spy Kids 3: Game Over. Robert Rodriguez had him playing a character called Long-Fingered Boy, which is obviously just incredibly upsetting and one of the worst things I’ve ever heard. That was 2003. Twenty-one years later, he’s Richard Linklater’s new dude, spouting Tom Cruise talk show anecdotes, and starring in the biggest movie of the summer.
In Twisters, Powell plays Tyler Owens, an Arkansan bull rider turned storm chaser so popular online that he and his fans have a special call-and-response.
Owens: IF YOU FEEL IT …
Fans: [Rabidly] CHASE IT.
The swaggering Stetsonhead gets a lot to nosh on here. He leads with the jawline, gets to scream things like “Look at those striations” and “We just had tornado genesis.” He also gets to stare at a computer and say, “Wow, these scans are impressive.” He’s got the whole buffet in his hands.
The wardrobe’s all cowboy boots, boot-cut jeans, and Western shirts. Stove on his waist, turns beef to patties. Someone in the movie calls him a cowboy scientist. Owens calls himself the Tornado Wrangler. He sells shirts that say, “Not My First Tornadeo.” Also featured prominently in the design, his face. You can buy one on the NBCUniversal website for $28.95.
Powell’s aforementioned Ram has plenty of bells and whistles. Anchoring down to two feet into the ground, extra weight on the chassis, rated to withstand an F1. Two augers are deployed by the press of a button. What’s more, sometimes the button works. In the middle of the grill guard is a tornado with horns and on the back tailgate: I’LL SEE YOU IN HAIL. Chung knows God’s in the details.
As a disciple of Cruise-us Christ, Powell’s already added the jaw flex to his repertoire. He deploys it nonstop, the way Rita deploys Putties. Sometimes his pristine smile can look painted and under glass, like it will never leave, like it could never even fade. He can make this vibe work for the most part, but it can also grate. In Twisters he’s at his best when he can’t cheese too hard—when something, storm or otherwise, takes the starch out of his cheeks and makes him react in the moment. That’s when he’s most interesting, most human. When he realizes he can die.
III. A Brief Pause for Qualms
- If movies have taught us anything, it’s that buttons don’t work when you need them to. Twisters is another in a long line of films that’s chock-full of bad buttons. If they’re so unreliable, why are they everywhere? More often than not, buttons work for me. I press them, the gate opens. I press them, the car starts. I press them, the garage door closes.
- Edgar-Jones is a remarkable actor whose Oklahoma accent fades away more than late-period Michael Jordan. Powell looks like he’s never worn a pair of Wranglers in his life, like he’s never put his thumbs in his belt loops, like he’s saying to himself the entire time, Be cool be cool be cool be cool.
- But let’s steer into the pain. There are, somehow, no flying cows. Not one. No flying cattle of any kind. The steak stays on the ground. Is Hollywood no longer a dream factory? It’s not as if the movie isn’t packed to the udders with cows. They’re everywhere, a major part of the decor. Maura Tierney plays Edgar-Jones’s mom, and she’s got a farm full of them. Every one of these lovelies—fat, sassy, and ready for the sky. I kept waiting for some CGI’d heifer to go hooves up and ride the wind. I would carry that wait with me to the parking lot. I carry it still.
- Most unbelievable is the behavior of the Oklahomans in the final act of the movie. Our heroes discover that an F5 is headed for a small town nearby, drop what they’re doing, and floor it to help/warn everyone. There’s a street festival happening? And a softball game being played? Neither of these things would be going on with tornadic weather in the area. Even taking tornadoes out of the equation, waiting until the first flash of lightning to finally call the game when undoubtedly everyone there is checking the weather on their phone every two minutes—no way it goes down that way.
- But the cake taker: Somehow, a bunch of small-town Oklahomans don’t know where to go during a tornado? I’m from northeast Oklahoma—Green Country, firmly within the violent confines of Tornado Alley. You learn as a child how to handle yourself when the wall clouds come knocking. You know how to take cover, how to stay safe. In a more realistic movie, Edgar-Jones and Powell’s people roll into an empty downtown, everyone back at their homes, waiting out the beast. Tornado warnings are part of their lives. Always have been. Always will be.
IV. Personal Stuff You Can Skip
When the sirens started wailing, we’d head to the bathroom. Kids and mom in the tub under pillows and couch cushions. Dad on the floor doing the same. Weather on the radio. Banshee choir outside. Thrashing wind. Trees snap and scream. Stampede on the roof. When it passed, we went back to bed. I’d stare at my ceiling and think about my room without it.
When I was a boy, on nights when storms were especially gnarly, I’d sit in front of the television, watch the weather, and wonder whether I was going to die. I’d stare at my county on the radar and chew my nails raw, mind flipping, body shaking. I was young and not used to them.
You never get used to the feeling, to the sound, but maybe you get used to the pageantry. The Doppler radar painting the lower-right-hand corner of network television, a red and green and yellow monster that sometimes hides the score of the Sooners game. The rolling list of counties that scroll along the bottom of the screen. The terms—atmospheric pressure, Fujita scale, funnel cloud. They become part of your lexicon, and you make peace with living in an area of the world where the sky will try to kill you. You accept the absurd. In Oklahoma, you have no choice. Spring brings flowers and hell. Get used to it, or call the movers.
