One sub-genre of cinema that has garnered heaps of success year after year amongst both critic receptions and box office statistics is the summer blockbuster. And Lee Isaac Chung's most recent directorial feature, 'Twisters' - a remake from the Jan De Bont's '1996 'Twister', is just another example of the summer blockbuster thriving once more.
Lee Isaac Chung very quickly established himself on the filmmaking scene with his 2020 language feature 'Minari'. The story follows a Korean family who move to Arkansas to grow produce and sell it to vendors, but along the way, the family face a number of challenges that threaten to destroy what they have created since moving to the States.
But now we see the Korean filmmaker in a completely different setting, a much bigger budget and a brand new toolset to play with as he took on the task of bringing disaster movies back to the cinema with 'Twisters'.
Although there are a lot of compelling factors about this movie that allows itself to be seemed as a successful summer blockbuster (the box office statistics being one of them), there are also a handful of aspects about this movie that cause words such as 'unoriginal' and 'generic' to be thrown up into the air.
One of those being the cringeworthy dialogue we are exposed to a number of times throughout the films 122 minute runtime. There are a number of ways to put an audience member off a scene, and cringey exchanges in dialogue between characters is one of the most effective ways of doing this.
This primarily tends to occur within the opening act of the movie, in which we see Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones), Javi (Anthony Ramos) and the rest of their group of friends attempt to 'wrangle' a tornado for research purposes. Although the cringey exchanges of dialogue don't seem to go on throughout the entire film's duration, we are exposed to enough of it in the opening act of the film to leave us with a bitter taste in our mouths.
With much bigger budgets, generally tend to come much bigger casts, and the crew of actors that Lee Isaac Chung has at his fingertips for this movie have more than enough audience-enticing factor. As previously mentioned, we see Anthony Ramos and Daisy Edgar-Jones star as two former college students with a deep and well-presented passion towards tornadoes, but the star of the show is none other than Glen Powell as Tyler Owens, the professional 'tornado wrangler'.
Whether it is the superstar traction that Glen Powell possesses upon his fans off screen, or his genuine ability to perform on it, every scene that he is included in just seems to be that bit more enticing, to the point where you know something is going to develop and the storyline is going to progress further and further.
And although Edgar-Jones and Ramos do their part in creating this trio of actors that are provided with the task of headlining this movie, it really is Powell that stands out amongst his peers and adds to the overall credibility of the movie.
Another aspect of this movie that I couldn't help but find myself disappointed with was the lack of originality within the storyline. No, this film isn't a like-for-like remake of the 1996 original, starring Bill Paxton, but it certainly feels as though the blueprint for this movie is very much parallel to 90% of disaster movies out there.
We are introduced to our characters, they all have similar intentions, a few bad things happen in the central acts of the film, and then a much larger and much more enhanced disaster occurs in the final act of the movie which is inevitably solved by our protagonists, uniting the male and female leads to the point where they become love interests.
Yes, there are a vast majority of audience members out there that tend to fall for this generic and over-utilised blueprint of blockbuster movies, but I for one would have much preferred for the film to take a different route to something that we have seen before and gamble with the highs and lows that come with that.
But then again, this is a movie about tornadoes. Are there really an infinite amount of ways that this movie could go to maximise it's audience's satisfaction?
PrimeTime Films Score: C
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