TWISTERS

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS

Let's twist again, like we did twenty-eight summers ago... Another example of a studio rummaging down the back of the Intellectual Property sofa and discovering something that must surely have some nostalgia mileage still left in it. Twister was a hit a generation ago and mysteriously never generated any followups at the time; perhaps a wise move to leave it as a one-off because it didn't really leave room for any kind of development other than mere repetition. And it's hard to see what's changed because Lee Isaac Chung's film has literally only one thing in common with Jan De Bont's, and that's the presence of the Dorothy device that dispenses the sensors into the tornadoes. (It doesn't even share the title font, except on the artwork!). None of the original's characters are even mentioned, none of the main crew have returned, not a bar of Mark Mancina's score is quoted. Which raises the question of why bother to give Michael Crichton and Anne-Marie Martin a credit in the first place.

Yet the similarities are endless: a traumatic opening reel tragedy for the heroine, lines of SUVs and pickups driving through cornfields and running each other off the road, small towns reduced to shattered debris, a support team of techies and loveable eccentrics, a Jo Grant character who's basically there to say "But Doctor, I don't understand" so everyone else can funnel the exposition to us (Jami Gertz in the original, an out-of-his-depth British journo in this one), a cinema ripped to pieces by the storm even as the film keeps playing, endless awful soft rock on the soundtrack. Daisy Edgar-Jones is even wearing the same costume Helen Hunt wore.

Missing, however, is any sense of character or chemistry: any sense of why the science gang are doing what they do. We do get why the rival group of stormchasers are in it: they're a bunch of thrillseeking YouTubers and swaggering dumbasses, more concerned with getting amazing drone footage and selling merchandise; they're led by a charmless and immediately obnoxious egotist (Glen Powell) and I spent the first hour plus hoping he'd get hit in the face with a combine harvester: he's no Bill Paxton There's a slight wrinkle in the motivations, in that the apparent good guys and loudly yeehawing idiots aren't quite as initially presented (can a film called Twisters have a twist?), but there's no depth to any of them so it's impossible to care.

I actually rewatched the original Twister on Blu the night before - hardly a chore as I've always liked it - and to be honest there isn't a level on which Twisters triumphs. Sure, there's not a huge complexity to the original's characters but at least they're likeable. The effects work, which was cutting-edge back in 1996, still stands up incredibly well; today's effects are undeniably terrific but so they damn well should be for the insane amount of money they spent on it. Benjamin Wallfisch's score is perfectly alright (when you can hear it) but nowhere near Mark Mancina's instantly memorable themes from the original. It looks wonderful, certainly: another example of how film stock will always be superior to digital.

So what was the object of the exercise? Without any of the original cast (two of whom have since passed away) or crew, this is more remake than sequel and it's nowhere near as good. On its own terms it's a spectacle, but that's all it is: a lot of loud noise, widespread destruction, and a plot that's basically a succession of increasingly large storms. That's true of the original, of course, but Twister was so immensely likeable and entertaining that it absolutely worked on the wild rollercoaster level. Twisters adds characterisation that's barely even thumbnail, a romance that doesn't remotely convince, and needless nostalgia for a film that's managed perfectly well as a one-off for nearly thirty years. I can't figure out why, but the original will always have a place on my Blu shelf and I'm pretty confident that I'll probably never watch Twisters again.

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