The Suck Zone: A Twisters Review
Security was extra tight tonight, presumably on account of the heinous Van Gogh-ings on regarding America’s Once and Future King, but also because of location. The 92nd Street Y is widely known as one of the pre-eminent bastions of Upper East Side Zionist treachery, and it was only about a month ago that power-mad dirty-hippie pro-Palestine scum-sucking Columbia students tried to ransack the place for deigning to allow former sitcom star/current Israeli warfare architect Jerry Seinfeld to speak on its premises. Nobody was really sure what was going to go down tonight during the talk by the stars of the new movie Twisters (the spiritual sequel to Jan De Bont’s 1996 triumph Twister), but as I passed through the body-strewn barbed wire fencing I noted the presence of the NYPD Counterterrorism Unit, armed to the teeth and hungry for trouble.
Our Boys/Bots in Blue were dutifully separating wheat from chaff, malignancies from benign cysts. I assumed I’d be yet another smiling cystic nothing, and yet
“Is that a purse?”
“More of an attaché case,” I explained.
“In line with the other girls.”
The “other girls” were basically the entirety of the audience, and the line moved in fits and starts as flashlights suspiciously met the various contents of our their purses until my attaché case was front and center.
“What is that?”
“Tupperware,” I masculinely explained.
The agent shook his head grimly, but ultimately allowed the contraband. “Don’t bring it next time. You can never be too careful.”
“No doubt. Gazan swine, the lot of them,” I offered as I shuffled off to my seat, trying to remember which demented peoples didn’t eat pork. (Spoiler alert: It’s both!)
Despite the fearsome funk that had settled over the venue, the other girls and I were still excited as hell to see Glen Powell and, to a much lesser extent, Daisy Edgar-Jones in the flesh. Sure, they may not have the primal sex appeal of Bill Paxton and Helen Horseface Hunt, but they’re movie stars for the moment goddamn it! The Malevolent Head Elder, a man named Abraham Moshe Manischewitz Gefiltefish Rabinowitz, entered the auditorium for a brief introduction, describing the movie as “exactly what the country needs right now.” Uhh…okay? The stars took the stage to whoops and hollers: Powell (his Adam’s apple extending beyond his chin) in cowboy boots and chambray under a cream colored blazer, and Edgar-Jones in an Invisibility Cloak for all we cared. The Q&A was mostly drowned out by the symphony of vibrators humming to life, but I was able to catch both that the two actors were drawn to this film because it’s a nuanced character study that just happened to have a blockbuster backdrop, and that it must be seen in IMAX.
And so I saw it in IMAX, short for IMAXed out my credit card paying for this fucking ticket. I had forgotten that the colossal screen eats up a lot of seating space, so the man in front of me was essentially resting his head in my lap for the whole film. And what a film. Directed by Lee Issac Chung and written by imma guess AI, it’s…it’s just fucking awful.
The hilarious notion that this movie’s a nuanced character study is more entertaining than the movie itself. To call the characters one-dimensional would be an insult to the height and heft of dots. Edgar-Jones plays Kate, a tornado expert who came dangerously close to earning a PhD and whose primary meteorological metric is, I shit you not, picking up a dandelion to see which way the spores blow. She’s been enlisted to help a team of crack scientists who are storm chasing for dubious reasons. And here the word dubious is doing double duty, in that it both refers to Kate unwittingly assisting the villain (played by Foghorn Leghorn) in his plans to buy up cheap tornadic land, and that those villainous plans are beyond incoherent. One of my earnestly favorite cinematic devices is when a semi-complicated future plot point is explained in advance via either physical or computer model (think Doc Brown’s RC car and miniaturized Hill Valley, or literally Bill Fucking Paxton explaining how the Titanic sank) to nullify any future confusion when shit gets heavy. This was done TWICE, both physically and computorally, but not once motivationally, which is where it really counts. I do not now, nor likely will ever, know why being able to forecast tornadoes is in any way relevant to purchasing land where tornadoes have already leveled the place.
Counter to this is the ragtag team of storm chasers headed by Powell’s Tyler, who I guess are the good guys? Powell’s charm is the only glimmer of hope in the entire film, but his inability to wrest the movie back from total oblivion speaks to why it’s taken him 35 years to still not be Brad Pitt. 🥴
The climax of Twisters finds a group of people taking shelter in a movie theater, and ends with that group staggering out in shock at the disaster that just took place. It was unclear when the screen turned into a mirror.
Post-script: Politics aside. No matter what side you support in the Israel/Palestine conflict, no group should be forced to watch Twisters.