Twisters (2024)

Twisters arrives nearly three decades after its predecessor, which is long enough that most of the audience has forgotten the flying cow. Lee Isaac Chung, who once made a quiet film about a Korean family in Arkansas, has been handed a large sum of studio money and a mandate to make weather go boom. He does this capably. The film is loud, well-built, and shot on actual celluloid, which lends the Oklahoma sky a texture that digital clouds rarely manage. Daisy Edgar-Jones plays Kate, a meteorologist haunted by a storm that killed three colleagues. Glen Powell plays Tyler, a YouTube storm chaser with a pickup truck and a grin calibrated for the back row.

The picture has opinions, though it states them gently. Storm Par, the corporate outfit, buys up tornado-flattened land for investors, while Tyler's crew funds relief efforts with merchandise money. Javi, the conflicted colleague, eventually walks off the job. This amounts to a critique of disaster profiteering delivered through plot mechanics, and it lands without a single character turning to the camera to explain it, which is more restraint than this genre usually permits. The moral is community aid over extraction. It is embedded, not announced.

Kate is a scientist who drives the climax, and the film declines to end on a kiss, a decision reportedly urged by Spielberg. The gesture reads as confidence in her arc, not as a statement. Her panic attacks are treated as trauma, plain and simple, and the diverse supporting cast goes about its business unremarked upon. Nobody lectures. Nobody reckons. The film wants to be a good time, and it mostly is. On the ledger of social consciousness, this is a modest entry: some equity in the casting, a mild jab at vulture capital, and a woman at the wheel of the truck. The rest is wind.