Movie: Twisters

Twisters has all the ingredients to ensure it’s a box office hit.

There are death defying, adrenaline pumping stunts as well as the developing relationship between its very attractive leads.

Providing the action are the scenes featuring catastrophic tornadoes causing havoc on the Oklahoma plains.

The relationship between meteorologists Kate Carter (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and Tyler Owens (Glen Powell) provides the movie’s romantic credentials.

When we first meet Kate she’s a PhD student researching the possible use of some type of material to diffuse tornadoes.  Her experiment goes terribly wrong resulting in the death of her fellow students in the first of the movie’s many terrifying `tornado scenes’.

Five years later we discover Kate has moved to New York and is working for a meteorological service. She’s drawn back to her tornado chasing days after a visit from Javi (Anthony Ramos), the one survivor of her failed experiment.

He’s developing a new portable radar system that can better study how tornadoes form and how meteorologists can more accurately, and quickly, predict when and where they might strike. He wants Kate to come and join him and his team of highly trained, disciplined and organised scientists to test the technology.

Renowned for her ability to read tornado patterns, she agrees to join him for a week. It seems her desire to protect communities from destructive tornadoes is strong enough to overcome the nightmares caused by the death of her friends.

Shortly after her arrival she comes across Tyler Owens (Glen Powell), a confident, handsome, former rodeo cowboy and now ‘tornado wrangler’. He’s a social media superstar whose exploits are broadcast live on his You Tube station.  His ‘colourful’ support team is the polar opposite to Javi’s uniformed cohort.

Needless to say Kate doesn’t approve of Tyler’s exploits, especially the self-promoting merchandise he sells to his many fans who follow him on the road.  She’s even less impressed when she sees him setting off fireworks, from his specially built vehicle, in the middle of a tornado.  However, gradually she discovers there’s more to Tyler than meets the eye and Javi hasn’t been totally honest with her.

Their developing relationship is played out against the destruction of several tornadoes that see towns and infrastructure spectacularly blown apart, somersaulting cars and trucks and lives lost as huge winds throw those in the tornadoes’ paths skywards.  Seeing that destruction reignites Kate’s passion of researching a way to defuse tornadoes.

While the devastation caused by these tornadoes is no laughing matter there’s still a few laughs during the movie thanks to the performance of the leads and supporting cast which includes Harry Hadden Paton as a British reporter who has joined Tyler’s crew and who is clearly not the ‘death defying’ type.

The interaction between Edgar-Jones and Powell also ensures Twisters, which is directed by Lee Isaac Chung (the Oscar-nominated writer-director of Minari), is as much a romance as special effects-driven action-adventure movie.

Twisters is currently screening in Australian cinemas.