Drive-In Saturday Tuesday Movie Review: “Twisters”

The Drive-In Saturday Tuesday Movie review series is, of course, named after the Bowie song but often has little more than that related to Bowie. For more Bowie, come back tomorrow…
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Movie: Twisters

Bowie connection: None whatsoever

Experience: Beautiful warm, summer night at the Jericho Drive-in in Glenmont. We sat in lawn chairs outside our car and I had a S’Mores and More sundae. The movie was incidental to the overall experience.

The Movie: The term “climate change” is never spoken, but that’s clearly the problem in need of solving in “Twisters,” the new sequel to the 1996 movie, “Twister,” which I never saw. But while climate change is the real problem, it would go against this movie’s ethos to acknowledge it directly. Instead, all that’s needed to combat more frequent, more intense tornadoes are chemicals, country music, cowboy swagger and big, tripped-out pickup trucks (gasoline powered, of course).

Yes, this is a movie analogizing the MAGA take on extreme weather: no need to make any societal lifestyle adjustments, someone will just figure out a pretty simple way to stamp-out its symptoms. Humans aren’t the problem— they are the solution.

As if the MAGA undercurrents of this movie were not blatant enough (look up what “the Storm” means in QAnon parlance), there’s a subplot about government agencies under the direction of a duplicitous multi-racial turncoat in the secret employ of a shadowy real estate developer who uses “data” to buy up properties in the wake of tornado damage. This is how the world works according to MAGA.

So, before I go on, I’m stuck on how this secret plot is exactly supposed to work. Nobody ever explains how the developer uses the “data” about tornadoes to further his evil plan. Also, it really isn’t clear how he’s supposed to make a profit buying damaged properties in a rural part of Oklahoma that’s been identified in the movie as being especially prone to extreme weather events. What’s he going to do? Buy up already-cheap properties at a further discount and build beach-front condos that millionaires will snatch up at inflated prices? Forget that there’s no beachfront. I kinda think that if a millionaire had a desire to buy land in rural Oklahoma and build a new house, that would already be pretty easy. But maybe they’d be wise to do it in part of Oklahoma that’s less prone to repeatedly getting clobbered by tornadoes.

And— I’m sorry to stay on this point— did I miss something or are employees of federal government agencies actually working for the developer while on the public payroll? I really might have missed that they are former government employees, so forgive me if that was explained. The developer is identified as an investor in this team, which is called, “Storm PAR,” but he’s clearly the boss’s boss. When most of the other members are introduced, they are identified as being from federal agencies. Could there be a clearer depiction of the MAGA concept of “the deep state?”

And that the cat’s paw head of this team had to be biracial fits in perfectly with the racist worldview that would have powerful elites manipulating lower-status groups (racial minorities) to serve as their foot-soldiers in their efforts to exploit real ‘Mericans. See Richard Hofstadter’s classic “The Paranoid Style of American Politics.”

Meanwhile, one of the two central character is Kate, played by Daisy Edgar-Jones, who can roughly be described as a tornado scientist, except her special skill is predicting tornadoes by what appears to be instinct, if not magic, rather than reading weather reports (which are repeatedly demonstrated to be wrong). Instinct is better than science. Check. Anyway, after being present when a bunch of her friends got killed by a tornado during a failed experiment, Kate abandons Oklahoma, her true self and her life mission for a desk job in, you guessed it, New York City. But she’s lured back by the turncoat, Javi, played by Hamilton alumn Anthony Ramos.

But Ramos isn’t really the co-star. That distinction belongs to Glen Powell, who plays Tyler. Tyler is introduced as an arrogant YouTube content creator who chases tornadoes and launches fireworks into them for show, while selling merch with his face on it along the way. We’re initially meant to think of Tyler as an antagonist. But funnily enough, he’s handsome, wears a cowboy hat, and thinks of a rodeo as a “good thing” (not a fun thing or a distraction, but a good thing). Why, he’s seems like an all-American! Which he turns out to be.

That merch? Turns out that he sells it to support disaster relief in the form of food for communities hit by tornados. And he wants to help— one of the evil government workers on the Storm PAR team says, at one point, “I don’t care about the people.” But Tyler is there to help. How? By going to towns about to be hit and telling people to take shelter. I guess that helps. I recently heard in a review of a different bad movie, that heroes frequently are shown to be telling bystanders to get out of the way of danger. The hero is selfless that way. And in this movie, the hero does this sometimes in the face of people who disbelieve him and would rather complain about their power going off in a motel. Their punishment? Death by tornado.

Again, I feel compelled to hold up and take a moment to contemplate what’s happening here— that this guy is a YouTube star validates the audience’s idea that they, too, can be heroes via social media. And the idea of “help” is essentially performative. Nobody else in town is noticing a gigantic tornado bearing down and thinks to go to the shelter? Tyler doesn’t so much as actually help as make a show of helping.

Tyler’s “face turn” (to borrow a wrestling phrase) is mirrored by Javi’s redemption story. This is another MAGA mainstay which kinda justifies Trump. Javi eventually comes back to the side of good, helping Tyler get out of a jam and helping Kate figure out how her pseudo- scientific theory on how to dissolve tornadoes with chemicals can actually work, with the help of a big pickup truck with built-in drills so it can stand still amidst tornadoes. And, of course it works. Tornadoes can be dissipated and the good (poor) people of rural Oklahoma can go back to lives doing ‘Merican stuff.

If you haven’t guessed by now, I did not like this movie. I liked going to the drive-In— I’ve actually seen worse. But this one was pretty bad.

Rating: One large durable plastic sheet with a grid of six rows and four columns of red, yellow, blue, and green circles, designed to be slip-resistant and accommodate people contorting their bodies with the intent of keeping their hands and feet on the big dots.