Twisters
Directed by Lee Isaac Chung
Written by Mark L. Smith
Starring Daisy Edgar-Jones, Glen Powell, Anthony Ramos
Runtime: 2 hours, 2 minutes
Rated PG-13
In theaters July 19

by Ryan Silberstein, Managing Editor, Red Herring

We were told we were going to make a difference. Millennials, I mean. During our childhoods, we were told to dream big, to think of all the ways we could impact the world for the better. Looking around at 2024–we’ve had zero U.S. presidents from the generation preceding ours (Biden is even older than Baby Boomers); the earth is warming three times as fast in our lifetime than it did for the previous century; wealth is becoming more and more concentrated; we’ve been through the biggest terrorist attack on U.S. soil in history; a truly disturbing number of school shootings; two wars; a major recession; a global pandemic…I could keep going–it doesn’t feel like much. Millennials, broadly speaking, were sold a hopeful future alongside massive loans for college tuition and the promise of the internet. What do we have to show for it?

This is the central question of Twisters, the first blockbuster to directly engage with the concerns of Millenials as a primary focus. For my generation, Twister (dir. Jan de Bont, 1996) was a formative movie experience, alongside Jurassic Park, Armageddon, and Independence Day. All of those movies showed how it wasn’t the people in charge who were going to get their hands dirty and save the day; it was the dirt-digging paleontologists, the oil rig workers, the hackers, and yes, the storm chasers. Long-gap sequels are always nostalgia pulls, and while Creed, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and The Force Awakens added actors from the Millennial generation to long-running, beloved franchises, none of those movies drew on Millennial nostalgia itself. Twister, however, is one of our movies, and now we’ve finally come of age to the point where a studio will spend $200 million on us. Budget excess aside, it almost feels nice just to have a seat at the table.

But nostalgia is not the central theme here, just the raison-d'etre for Twisters to exist. Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones) grew up in Oklahoma obsessed with tornadoes and trying to understand how to stop them. Twisters opens with a prologue showing how, through a traumatic experience with a tornado, she lost her friends, her boyfriend, and her drive to keep going forward. Now she lives in New York, working at NOAA (another thing Project 2025 wants to dismantle), until Javi (Anthony Ramos) lures her back to the midwest for a new project. Javi and his tech startup, Storm Par, have obtained new portable prototypes of a new imaging radar that they want to use for better tornado data. Kate decides to face her fears in the hopes that she will be able to help save lives and livelihoods of those in Tornado Alley, especially since storms have gotten more prevalent over a bigger area thanks to climate change.

While Kate struggles to face her trauma and the fear of tornadoes that resulted from it, she also meets Tyler “Tornado Wrangler” Owens (Glen Powell), a charming storm chaser who makes a living by live streaming storm chasing on YouTube. While Storm Par is the requisite “snobs”–in this case, a group of PhDs and tech bros–Owens and crew are a lot more ragtag. Yes, they use all of the tools they have available to them, but all of the social media is in service of them earning a living doing what they love. As the film goes on, Kate wrestles with her attraction to Owens, but she also has to reckon with the choice many Millennials must face: join a startup that promises to “disrupt” an industry while helping people but is merely papering over exploitation with fancy tech and nice rhetoric or sell yourself as a “content creator” to the mercy of the masses and the almighty algorithm.

All of this is contained within what feels like a Twister movie. Lee Isaac Chung understands exactly what made Spielberg’s ‘70s and ‘80s blockbusters (as well as a number of Spielberg-produced Amblin movies from the ‘90s) resonate with audiences: characters worth caring about in tense situations. While Kate has a very well-defined character, Glen Powell dazzles in every single moment on screen. Chung leans into Powell as a romantic lead, having him walk around in the rain in a tight white shirt and even keeping his hand in focus during a key sequence where he is trying to protect Kate during a tornado. While Powell’s body–to quote Emma Stone in Crazy, Stupid, Love–looks “photoshopped,” he is still much more recognizable as a normal human being than your average superhero these days, which also makes him more attractive. Twisters places its characters in classic disaster situations, where awe of nature’s power is quickly replaced by terror. While Twisters is obviously a sequel, it is still refreshing to have a blockbuster tell a smaller scale story with clear stakes and zero glowing sky portals or surprise kaiju attacks while not skimping on spectacle.

Because this is a blockbuster movie, things more or less work out for Kate, as she returns to the college project we saw fail at the beginning of the film. Her genuine desire to help people with science–without thought for how she can use this discovery to launch a subscription service–is rekindled, and she feels like she comes back to life. As I Saw the TV Glow also reminded us this year, it’s not too late. We can still change the world. It just requires far more perseverance and revolution than we thought.