On Thursday Oct. 17, The Student Entertainment Committee hosted a movie night where they screened the film “Twisters . ” “Twisters” came out earlier this year on July 19 and was directed by American filmmaker Lee Isaac Chung. I went into this movie with little expectation but it turns out it was better than I thought it was going to be. This article will have mild spoilers, so beware.
The film follows a young girl named Kate, played by Daisy Edgar-Jones, who has been obsessed with tornadoes and tornado research since she was a very young girl. She even developed her own tornado chasing team while she was in high school. Kate’s motivation for doing all of her research on tornadoes was because she wanted to find a way to stop tornadoes using sodium polyacrylate, a very absorbent material that traps moisture.
Her plan was to fill barrels with the absorbent material and have the tornado take it up and make it implode on itself because its moisture would be absorbed by the sodium polyacrylate. On the day she went to go and test the experiment with her storm chasing crew, the tornado transformed from an EF1 tornado to EF5 tornado. “EF” is the measurement term for tornados, which stands for enhanced fujita.
Unfortunately, the two friends and her boyfriend, Jeb, didn’t survive. Kate and Javi, who is played by Anthony Ramos, were the sole survivors. Javi, five years later, would start a business scanning 3-D models of tornadoes and he would convince Kate, who swore never to chase a storm again, to help him.
On their journey they would meet a YouTuber named Tyler Owens, played by Glen Powell. He would play a huge role later on in the movie. The film never really set up the 5-year time skip very effectively, plus I don’t like time skips to begin with. I would’ve wanted to see Kate struggle with the PTSD of witnessing her friends and boyfriend’s deaths to get more insight on her character. I would’ve wanted to see Kate’s motivations to start her career as an extreme weather analyst in New York, and how she got there. Similarly, I wanted to see Tyler’s origin and motivations to start his YouTube channel. Instead they went with an unnecessary time skip that left many questions unanswered and more plot details to be desired.
The movie “Twisters” was a solid 6/10 for me. It wasn’t terrible but it definitely wasn’t the greatest movie in the world. I loved Kate and Tyler’s characters a lot but every other character seemed a bit shallow to me and lacked depth. The plot was carried out well but the pacing seemed a little off. There were times where it was way too slow or way too much was happening all at once. We see multiple tornado scenes throughout the whole movie and all of them came out of nowhere with not much buildup at all. It really watered down how dangerous and serious the tornadoes were supposed to be portrayed. The only storm scene that had a proper buildup was the final one. The other storm scenes that happened in the middle seemed pretty much useless to the plot as a whole.
However, the production of all of the tornado scenes were incredible. They were loud, chaotic, intense, and very fear inducing. The rain and wind were insanely loud adding to the terrifying nature of tornadoes. Take that and put it with the sounds of the character’s desperate dialogue, the cries for help from civilians, and seeing all the destruction play out on screen was magnificent. Since there were so many storm scenes, it made each tornado seem less and less significant and ruined their auras completely.
Despite me being critical of the copious amounts of tornado scenes it shouldn’t deter you from watching the entire film and getting proper entertainment from it. It was a good movie. But there were a few things I found wrong that may hinder me from seeing the movie again. It’s kind of like one of those movies you see once and then don’t have to again.