“Twisters” Is The Summer Love Letter To Americana We Can’t Get Enough Of
In the summer of Glen Powell, "Twisters" has arrived to storm the box office.
If you’ve been paying attention to the rise of Glen Powell, you were probably looking forward to Twisters as much as I was. It’s been a drought of a box office so far this summer, and other than the surprise success of Inside Out 2, movie lovers have been desperately waiting for it to rain. Well, rain it has, because action remake Twisters is stirring up exactly the storm of millennial and Gen Z crowds we’ve been waiting for.
The film follows Kate Carter (Daisy Edgar-Jones), a girl with an uncanny ability to predict the weather, who has left her home state of Oklahoma after a tragic tornado accident involving her boyfriend, Jeb (Daryl McCormack). But when Kate’s old friend Javi (Anthony Ramos) begs her to come help him collect data to help save lives in “Tornado Alley,” Kate meets Tyler (Glen Powell), a YouTube celebrity tornado-chaser who might be the guy to help her stop running away from her fears.
The numbers are in: Twisters is the third highest film opening so far this year, far surpassing opening weekend predictions. A remake of the 1996 hit film Twister, starring the late Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt, Twisters has proved a truth we’ve suspected all along: It’s not movie remakes we hate, it’s the bad remakes we can’t stand. With an incorrigibly proud depiction of a rural America that rarely makes it to the big screen and a dynamic cast chock full of charm, Twisters is well on its way to be this year’s Top Gun: Maverick.
Lee Isaac Chung: A Director in Love with Middle America
From the outset, Twisters maintains a respectful and affectionate depiction of the part of our country that doesn’t get much attention: the small towns and wheat fields of middle America. This is due in great part to Twisters’s director, Lee Isaac Chung. The son of South Korean immigrants, Chung was raised in rural Arkansas for most of his life and later attended Yale University where he reportedly studied ecology before switching to study film.
Chung’s deeply felt love for middle America became clear in his breakout, Oscar-nominated film Minari. Inspired by his own childhood, Chung tells the story of a Korean immigrant family who move to rural Arkansas in the 1980s in hopes of building a family farm. Struggling to make ends meet and learning the ways of a land foreign from their own, Minari is a modern reminder of America’s age-old promise: that it will provide a place where people can work to better their life.
But Chung’s devotion to the landscape of middle America, which imprinted on his young imagination, and his study of ecology at Yale University didn’t turn him into an activist. In Twisters, hot button political phrases including “climate change” are notably absent from the script and storyline. When asked why the topic was excluded, Chung responded, “I just wanted to make sure that with the movie, we don’t ever feel like [it] is putting forward any message. I just don’t feel like films are meant to be message-oriented. … I think what we are doing is showing the reality of what’s happening on the ground. We don’t shy away from saying that things are changing.”
Unlike the woke agenda producing machine found in many parts of Hollywood, Chung and the Twisters team were interested in telling a good story, not in preaching about causes to their audience. It’s this focus on “reality” which makes the film both so beautiful and refreshing. To anyone who’s taken a sunset drive through Oklahoma or Kansas, the beauty of America’s plains is a portrait ignored by too many painters. Chung’s film inspires the audience to want to care for that country, instead of preaching to them about how it ought to be cared for.
Twisters Is Grounded in the Culture of Rural America – and It’s Proud of It
There’s an overpowering spirit of Americana everywhere in Twisters – from the American flags flying unironically everywhere throughout the film to the extended rodeo sequence, which exists primarily to show the ordinary courage found in country pastimes. The part of the country best known as “the flyover states” is the focal point of the story and the camera angles. The film plays like a love letter to rural, country, Americana-infused patriotism – to the land of cowboys and farmers.
It’s clear early on that Twisters is going to be an ode to Americana with its nod to another classic of rural American spirit: The Wizard of Oz. Kate’s tornado-taming science project is nicknamed Dorothy (as in the 1996 original). Later, Javi names his tornado data collectors after Dorothy’s companions: Scarecrow, Lion, and Tin Man. It’s more than an oblique or gimmicky reference to another film classic, however. Kate closely resembles The Wizard of Oz’s Dorothy, as she too is a girl who will ultimately learn that there is no place like home. Just as Dorothy’s Scarecrow discovers he has a brain, the hidden cleverness behind Tyler’s celebrity persona will eventually be revealed. Like the Tin Man before him, Javi will eventually learn to follow the heart he stopped listening to when their friends died.
This is one of the most attractive, and refreshing, aspects of Twisters. Often in big Hollywood productions, the culture of rural America is treated as a comedy gimmick – a picture of stupid but lovable country bumpkins. But Americana isn’t a gimmick in Twisters. It’s the beautiful culture at the heart of America which the film is reminding its audience has been there all along.
This unironic approach to rural America is best embodied by Glen Powell’s YouTube celebrity tornado-chaser Tyler, who at first appears to be the same brash and self-centered figure Powell played in Top Gun: Maverick. Yes, Tyler has the huge truck, country music, and fireworks that Hollywood often associates with the less “sophisticated” country culture. But Tyler is also highly educated, with a degree in meteorology just as good as Kate’s, and he’s no less intelligent or astute than the white tie chasers Kate and Javi are working with. Tyler is proud of being a country boy, of riding face-on into a storming tornado – and it’s this that ultimately proves so attractive to Kate.
Twisters Believes in Grassroots Movements, Not Company Men
When we first meet Tyler and his storm chasing friends, they blast into a parking lot blaring loud country music and set up shop to sell t-shirts with Tyler’s face on them and the slogan "It’s not my first tornadeo.” Tyler and his team are in sharp contrast to the team of tucked-shirt scientists Kate and Javi are in league with. It’s a clash of cultures: company men with P.h.Ds and a grassroots group of amateurs.
Over the course of the film, Kate (and eventually Javi) begins to have questions about the big businessmen they’ve been working with, represented by Javi’s co-worker Scott (future Superman David Corenswet). Slowly, they realize that Javi’s investors are really out to take advantage of families who have lost everything to tornado devastation. Reminded of their own losses to tornadoes, Kate and Javi become increasingly concerned at profiting off the suffering of others.
Instead, as Kate comes to know more about Tyler and his misfit team of storm chasers, she learns that they take money not just to support their own chasing efforts, but also to feed and support people who have just lost their homes due to tornado attack. The contrast between the two groups of chasers, it turns out, is more than cultural. The misfit team of storm chasers, who chase simply for the love of it, are able to truly see the people behind the disasters, whereas the team of company men sees only data and dollar signs.
Twisters is a love story that shows more than Kate and Tyler’s growing attraction. Kate, who has always loved bad weather (“The worse the weather, the happier the girl,” says her mother), finds that she can only really be happy chasing tornadoes if she’s doing it for the love of the chase and for the love of the people she can help save. In Twisters, it’s not the big business or agency that brings healing and happiness to a community. Only the grassroots movement born of an amateur’s love can bring the ultimate satisfaction.
Closing Thoughts
The success of Twisters may be surprising the movie forecasters, but we’re not surprised one bit. With an unironic sense of patriotism and pride in the spirit of Americana, Twisters is the perfect summer blockbuster: lovable characters, uplifting cinematography, and riotous good fun.
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