There’s been a lot going on in politics lately, and I frankly need a bit of a breather from the campaign. So today I want to talk about something as important, if not more so, than the 2024 election: “Twisters.”
The movie is a sequel, of sorts, to the 1996 classic “Twister.” Like the original, it features people driving trucks into tornados for science.
But while the original pitted our heroic team of cool storm-chasers against a rival much more obnoxious team, the sequel creates an actually villainous team of tornado scientists who are covertly working for evil financial interests. The new movie is very fun and well-crafted, a perfect summer popcorn movie. Except for this villain part. It’s totally unclear what the bad guys’ bad plan even is, but beyond that — and more seriously — it’s not clear to me why you’d even think that what they’re doing is bad.
All things considered, it’s a good movie that just isn’t the kind of plot-heavy beast that hinges on a compelling villain. This is truly the Year of Glen Powell, who is amazing in this, just as he was in “Hitman” and “Anyone But You” earlier in the year. Daisy Edgar-Jones is charming and turns in a credible American accent. The supporting players, including a guy from TV On The Radio, are fun, and Maura Tierney pops up midway through to surprise us. The original “Twister” had impressive effects for the mid-nineties, but contemporary CGI tornadoes are just a lot better and the movie is genuinely thrilling. I’m not here to hate, I’m glad it crushed it at the box office.
But it is part of a larger cultural trend of stigmatizing a sort of arbitrary sub-set of perfectly harmless win-win economic transactions that just happen to involve someone who’s in a bad situation — in this case, people who’ve just had their homes wrecked by tornadoes. I think this kind of stigma really does influence society and public policy, mostly for the worse, because it’s people in bad situations who need commercial opportunities the most.
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