You don’t face you fears…you ride them. There’s your future popular yearbook quote…if that’s still a thing. Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones) has succumbed to her fears at the funnel of a tornado. Five years ago, the college student and science whiz was chasing an Oklahoma tornado with her friends and classmates. Together, they built a tool capable of shrinking a tornado if deployed in its funnel. Optimism runs high up until the moment it’s released. The tool fails to stop the tornado and every single one of her friends save for one dies right in front of her.

Five years later and now in New York City working as a behind-the-desk meteorologist, Kate’s past returns in Javi (Anthony Ramos), her only surviving friend. Javi has come with an ask, wanting Kate to come back to Oklahoma during tornado season and impart her knowledge of tornados at Storm Par, created by Javi with the intent of saving lives by capturing the data necessary to relay information better to residents during warnings. Reluctant, Kate obliges, and quickly gets introduced to another team of carefree, fame-seeking storm wranglers led by YouTube sensation Tyler Owens (Glen Powell). The differences between the teams couldn’t be more stark, but they’ll all need to be at their best for what Mother Nature has in store.

It was a slow start to the summer box office, but since June and the release of Bad Boys: Ride or Die, it’s not only humming, but thriving. Yet even with the successes (specifically one ginormous one with the final opening weekend results of Deadpool and Wolverine as of this writing), there hasn’t been one movie that feels like a bona fide summer blockbuster, until Twisters. With a young, attractive cast, heavy portions of Americana, and impressive CGI, it’s one of the most blissful moviegoing experiences of the year.

For director Lee Isaac Chung, the broad gulf differences between this film and the last one he helmed in the personal Minari are evident. But a similarity the two share is a reverence for the beauty of the serene and rural American Midwest. When columns or air aren’t rotating rapidly, Chung spends time at a farm, in a dusty downtown, a stripped down motel, and a community rodeo. Paired with a fitting soundtrack, these moments hearken back to a yesteryear, even if one has never grown up in the area it’s showcasing. And when it’s time to get down to destruction, he films it as if he’s done wide scale blockbusters before. One of the bigger success markers about disaster features is feeling like you’re actually watching a violent act of nature as opposed to it looking like it was passably rendered on a green screen. His twisters have weight, seen most clearly during a gripping opening scene.

The story of Twisters, attributed to Joseph Kosinski but script-written by Mark L. Smith, is more than comfortable to do no more than what is required to make sure each successive tornado set piece comes along at a steady clip. There are some light brushes on deeper themes like commercialization (Twisters has a few similarities to 2015’s Everest on that front and its 1996 de facto predecessor), but the movie is concerned with entertaining, not telling an allegory, which is totally OK. It’s a feature where its trailer is quite revealing, not particularly due to the specifics, rather what has to happen logically for its top two billed stars to come together after starting the runtime on opposite ends of the storm-chasing competition. One thing Smith and Chung do very well is choosing to stick with its female co-lead and give her the opportunities to be strong and tough, as opposed to giving these to the strapping and strong hot new megastar.

Twisters continues the ascent of Powell, and it’s been impossibly hard not to buy in. He’s a charisma magnet who brings a level of infectiousness into every part. He’s also a force multiplier, with an easy ability to forge chemistry with so many contrasting co-stars. Powell isn’t the whole movie, and treating him as such minimizes the great work by Edgar-Jones. While her character isn’t the most unique from an arc perspective, it is a tried and true arc generating enough pathos to care about her journey. It’s more of a mixed bag with Ramos, passable here but very much coming off as the nonexistent third wheel even as he’s the one to pull the lead Kate back into the tornado chase fray.

If it isn’t clear by now, Twisters is closer to the Fast & Furious-style summer flicks than, say, a movie released nearly a year before in Oppenheimer. But it’s certainly the type of blockbuster that brings a smile to the soul, stirring up some feelings of fun I don’t mind chasing.

B

Photo credits go to cinemablend.com, yahoo.com, and msn.com.

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