Clever oldies will remember disaster films from Titanic (1953) to The Towering Inferno (1974).
They never really went away – there have been six Titanic films alone in the last 70 years. But they have gone out of fashion a bit.
So Twisters is a welcome return to edge-of-your-seat, heart-in-your-mouth disaster films – as well as being the imaginatively named sequel to Twister (1996), written and produced by Michael Crichton.
It really isn’t much more than the tale of tornado-chasers – either being scooped up into the air to certain death by an Oklahoma twister or dodging them by the skin of their teeth in their battered pick-up trucks.
A conventional love story is laid on top of the horror scenes. Kate (north-London girl Daisy Edgar-Jones, pulling off a very convincing American accent) is a tornado scientist. She thinks she’s found a way of collapsing tornadoes by seeding them with chemicals, and then sees her boyfriend killed by a twister. So she’s horrified when Tyler (charming Glen Powell), a ‘tornado wrangler’, makes a mint through selling disaster T-shirts and posting tornado videos on YouTube.
It’s all pretty formulaic stuff. You know that formula will involve the two best-looking members of the cast, Edgar-Jones and Powell, hating and then snogging each other. And early on there’s a lot of dialogue (the writers include Michael Crichton again) praising or criticising the tornadoes with a limited range of expletives – all to a dreary, thudding soundtrack.
But, still, somewhere along the way, you’re gripped by the sheer terror brought on by tornadoes. Disaster-film producers realise that real-life horrors – such as the Titanic sinking – are much more affecting than fantasy ones.
Remember the ludicrously unscary appearance of The Thing (1982), a shape-shifting alien, or The Blob (1958), a carnivorous, amoeboid alien?
Perhaps all keen filmgoers are also from childhood for ever traumatised by the scene where a tornado whisks Dorothy’s home from Kansas to Munchkinland in The Wizard of Oz (1939). Thus Judy Garland’s wise, bathetic line to her dog after the tornado, ‘Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas any more.’
Kansas, like Oklahoma – where Twister and Twisters were set and filmed – is in the heart of Tornado Alley, a vast stretch of land running down the middle of America from North Dakota to Texas. There are more tornadoes in America than anywhere else in the world. The weather is tragically ideal, with cool air hitting warm air, sparking off thunderstorms.
The apocalyptic scenes in Twisters, where whirlwinds cut swathes through Oklahoma towns, are not an exaggeration. Already this year there have been more than 800 tornadoes in America, killing 37 people.
And so the tornadoes in Twisters are half-chillingly, half-deliciously convincing. Director Lee Isaac Chung and cinematographer Dan Mindel cleverly build up the power of successive tornadoes throughout the film until the final big one in El Reno, Oklahoma.
It’s no coincidence that it’s set there. El Reno is where the biggest tornado ever recorded struck on 31st May 2013. 2.6 miles wide and whirling at 313 mph, it killed four tornado-chasers – an inspiration for the opening scene of Twisters, where the chasers are whisked to their deaths.
In an echo of another real tragedy, the Twisters denouement takes place in an El Reno cinema, ripped apart by a tornado – just like the one that neatly, brutally plucked out the screen of a cinema in Mayfield, Kentucky, in 2021 and killed 76 people.
Watching a cinema being peeled open in Oklahoma while I was sitting comfortably in an intact cinema in Soho was strangely disturbing and reassuring at the same time – which I suppose is the point of a good old disaster film.
