Twisters

Front Row at the Movies by Shirrel Rhoades

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Even been caught in a tornado? Pretty scary, huh? Even when it’s an F1, a funnel cloud that does minimal damage. But if you saw the 1996 film “Twister,” you have an edge-of-your-seat idea of what an F5 tornado might be like.

A new film – a stand-alone sequel called “Twisters” – hopes to keep you gripping the arms of your seat.

The original film centered around Jo and Bill Harding (Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton), husband-and-wife storm chasers who must dodge dangerous tornados as they crankily work together to create an advance warning system called “Dorothy.”

“Twister” was the second highest-grossing film at the box office in 1996.

In this new film, we meet storm chaser Kate Cooper (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and her friend Javi (Anthony Ramos) as they set out to test a revolutionary new tornado tracking system on the plains of Oklahoma. There, they bump heads with Tyler Owens (Glen Powell), a social media star known as “The “Tornado Wrangler.” But this competition has to be set aside when they find themselves caught in the path of multiple tornados.

In 2021, Helen Hunt expressed her interest in writing and directing a sequel to the original film. However, the studio rejected her proposal – electing to go forward with a new team.

Bill Paxton had died in 2017, and Hunt was in her mid-50s (that awkward age for female movie stars). So this time around, we get a stand-alone story directed by Lee Isaac Chung from a screenplay by Mark L. Smith based on a concept by Joseph Kosinski.

As Smith tells the story, “Joe Kosinski reached out, he had this great idea to get back into the ‘Twister’ world, and so he sent me the pitch, and it was fun. We kind of beat it out and then went to Steven Spielberg and Frank Marshall (the executive producers of ‘Twister’), and then they signed off.”

Rumors of Hunt reprising her role in a “Twisters” cameo circulated when the sequel was announced, but this was dashed when Smith clarified there would be no storyline connection between the films. “It’s more of a modern reinvention than a sequel,” he adds.

Director Chung explains, “What was essential to me was that it always felt like in that first movie, which didn’t necessarily feel like a disaster movie. To me, it felt like an adventure movie, and I always loved how that movie inspired a generation of meteorologists and people who were interested in science and weather just because it made that study feel like it was an adventure. That’s something that I wanted to retain with this one.”

“Twisters” was filmed in Oklahoma, a section of the Tornado Alley corridor where storms kept popping up “constantly” during the filming.

“One day, we were filming this scene where a tornado rips through a farmers market, and they made this amazing set full of these stalls. And this crazy windstorm came in and took the entire set out,” says star Daisy Edgar-Jones. “We were hunkered down in the shops nearby, watching the whole set be destroyed, only for us to then film it being destroyed 20 minutes later when they set it back up again.”

Another time the crew saw a massive mesocyclone cloud forming in the sky behind them. “We all had to leave and it produced a tornado,” says Daisy. Director Isaac Chung actually went out chasing it. “We weren’t allowed to for insurance reasons,” she grouses.

Email Shirrel: srhoades@aol.com