Review Wednesday

****SPOILERS!!!*****

I was finally able to watch Twisters (2024). [Don't ask me how], and I wanted to post some thoughts.

I was really excited when they announced Twisters, because the original Twister (1996) is ranked in my top 10 favorite movies. It might even be in my top 5. I had planned on trying to get in to theaters to see it in either IMAX or in those 4DX theaters that have wind and stuff. But apparently those options are only available for like a week, and then the movie stays playing on regular screens. So I missed out on that and honestly...

I'm glad I did.

Oooooh hot take. Apparently this movie was really well received. I'm probably
just too old. But here is my perspective. I am 40 years old, so yes, I grew up watching the original Twister. And as much as I'm not "all up on the lingo" (lolz, I love saying it like that. Makes me feel even older), I do keep up with tech and watch youtube almost exclusively. So I'm not even complaining that this movie jumped on the "youtube celebrities do shit to get views" trend, I completely understand that. Yes, they pulled Twister and brought it up to date in 2024. It annoyed me slightly, but it wasn't the end of the world.

What I was really hoping for was a few callbacks to the original movie. Jurassic World, for example (The first movie was great, the rest... not so much). I realize that it's a slightly different context; after all, Jurassic World is pulling from Jurassic Park's ideas directly, and making a sequel in a sense, and Twisters is not that. But the amount of references and callbacks to Jurassic Park was outstanding. The nostalgia it threw at me was so cool. And I loved it so much for that. It makes me wonder if they even cared that the movie Twister even existed. That movie was so disconnected from the original film that it makes me think they tried to name it Twister and realized that name was already taken so they just added an 's'.

[I just read an article that it turns out yes, they cared; some people who worked on this version had also worked on the original. But like, it just doesn't feel like it, I guess.]

There were a few things I thought might have been callbacks - obviously at the beginning they used the Dorothy sensors. But then they abandoned that and completely forgot about them. It seems as though the whole plot of using the 3 radar sensors was a "better" idea that using Dorothy? I don't know why, but okay. (In addition, forcing one of the sensors to sit in the direct path in addition to it needing to be close, was really dumb. Obviously it wouldn't last long and it would have been sucked up almost immediately. I hope those "prototypes" that he "Borrowed"???? from the military were cheap!) 

The red truck that Tyler owned seemed to be a callback to the original red truck. They used the reporter as the same kind of cabbagehead (I don't know if this is a Star Trek only term or not but it basically means the dumb person who asks the questions so that the audience is in the know about plot devices) as Bill Paxton's soon-to-be therapist wife. I wouldn't say that's a callback but it actually would have been nicer to get more out of                                                                     him in the movie.

They had Kate wear basically the same outfit as Jo, I definitely noticed that. They used the same ideas with the youtubers as they did with the original, by having someone driving an RV (for absolutely no reason because it wasn't for research, they were just there to throw fireworks into tornadoes to get views) and giving people nicknames. They even did the whole "vehicle gets cut off by them driving
in from nowhere and almost running them off the road" bit, which actually happened twice (once was fine, thanks). They did copy the lines "I'm glad you're back!" "I'm not back!" from the first movie only they meant it this time lol.

They did the whole "water pipes go really far into the ground so it's a good place to hang onto" piece, but Twister did it better because they had something to tie themselves to. Just holding onto pipes would do very little, especially because they can be slippery. Plus, what kind of pool has exposed pipes? And also destroying the movie screen with the tornado, but like, why would the movie still be playing? In the original, it was pitch black outside, and the tornado was a complete surprise. No one even knew it was there until it ripped the screen. But at this point, the tornado sirens were blaring and people were hiding - the movie  should have been shut off. AND WHY DOES NO WHERE HAVE A BASEMENT??? You're in Tornado Alley ffs!!

Also, how does Tyler keep finding Kate? At the motel and at her own freaking  house??? CREEPER!! And that special truck can dig into the ground to two feet? Two freaking feet? Like, especially if the soil is loose enough to dig, it won't do shit in the middle of a spinning vortex. Not to mention it shouldn't have been driveable a day or two after the ending incident where he ended up at the airport. Nice try! But anyway, the point wasn't to nitpick the movie to death. I'm trying to rate it on its own merits because they obviously didn't want it to relate to Twister too much. It's not like Twister didn't have plot holes and such. It wasn't a perfect film. But it was better than this.

If you want Kate to have trauma from losing all of her friends to a tornado at the beginning of the movie, (which she has every right to. But also show that she didn't get therapy from it, I guess), then actually show that. Don't have her freak out 1 time and then be perfectly fine afterwards. Jo lost her father to an EF5 tornado when she was like, 6. And it still traumatized her; and you could tell. But Kate seemed to get over it pretty quick.

          I know the asshole in the white shirt is not Cary Elwes and I know it can't be but why isn't it??

Twisters is also glamorizing youtubers, to almost a scary degree. This movie makes it seem like being a youtuber is nothing but easy, and it's fun to drive into a tornado and shoot fireworks into it. Like, what? I really hope no one young and stupid enough watches this movie and decides to make that their career. They seem to think it's all fun and games until they get trapped in one. Granted, they use their youtuber revenue to give back to torn up communities, so that's nice. The whole movie felt kind of... hollow. We're made to believe that Kate is suffering so badly from her traumatic experience that she moved away from home and refuses to answer her mother's phone calls. Yet gets back into the swing of things really quick (movies should really learn to normalize characters going to therapy). We get no real details as to who Javi was really working for. It's one 3 second google search and then a confrontation. 

On the plus side, we're not made to suffer through a love triangle so that great. We don't even get the big kiss at the end, which is another trope I don't mind skipping. The action is good and it doesn't slow down for long, which is something that Twister had issues with. But pacing in a movie about tornadoes is probably pretty hard. You don't want it to be constant or else it'll feel more like an apocalypse movie, but you also don't want too much downtime or it gets boring. Unfortunately that means the characters suffer a bit when you don't take time out for them.

So in the end, the movie was... fine. It's hard not to compare it to Twister, and I am disappointed there were no flying cows. That would have been the best callback ever. It's a decent update to a almost 30 year old movie, but it definitely can't replace it.