Twisters

Twisters is that rare modern blockbuster that feels like it was made for the entire country, not just the coasts. In a Hollywood landscape where every other franchise film seems engineered to deliver a message, Lee Isaac Chung directed a movie about tornadoes that is actually about tornadoes. And communities. And courage. And a cowboy scientist with a YouTube channel who drives into storms and then donates his merch money to rebuild the town that just got flattened.

Let's get the plot out of the way. Kate Carter (Daisy Edgar-Jones) is an Oklahoma meteorology student whose experimental attempt to weaken a tornado goes catastrophically wrong in the film's opening minutes. Three of her friends die. She retreats to a desk job at NOAA in New York City. Five years later, her old friend Javi (Anthony Ramos) lures her back to Oklahoma to help test a new tornado scanning system for a company called Storm Par. Once there, she crosses paths with Tyler Owens (Glen Powell), a self-styled 'Tornado Wrangler' who chases storms for his YouTube audience, planting his modified truck into the ground with hydraulic anchors while shooting fireworks into the vortex. Tyler's crew wears red. Javi's crew wears blue. The metaphor is not subtle.

What follows is a summer disaster film that actually works because it cares about its people. Not in a performative way. Not in a 'here is my trauma backstory' way. In a 'these people live in tornado alley and they rebuild every single time and that is beautiful' way.

Glen Powell is the movie. There is no other way to say it. His Tyler Owens is the kind of character Hollywood used to produce regularly and now almost never does: a man who is competent, funny, courageous, and decent without being boring. He is a showman who uses his platform to help people. He does not apologize for being from the South. He does not have a dark secret or a redemption arc. He is just a good guy who happens to be great at his job and ridiculously charming. When Kate discovers that Tyler's merchandise profits go directly to tornado victims, it is the moment the film declares its values. This man is not performing goodness for the camera. He is doing it because someone has to.

Powell told the press that 'vast parts of America are underserved by Hollywood,' and Twisters feels like his personal mission statement. The film is set in Oklahoma, shot in Oklahoma, and populated with Oklahoma people. The rodeo scene in Stillwater is not tourist anthropology. The mom's farm in Sapulpa is not poverty porn. The destroyed towns are treated with grief and dignity, not spectacle. Chung, who grew up in rural Arkansas, clearly understands these communities because he comes from one.

Daisy Edgar-Jones does solid work as Kate, though she is inevitably overshadowed by Powell's supernova charisma. She is strongest in the opening sequence, where her terror during the failed experiment is palpable and the deaths of her friends land with genuine weight. Her panic attacks are played with restraint and realism. Where she struggles is in the quieter character scenes with Powell, where the chemistry exists but never quite ignites into the kind of electricity the film wants. They are a good screen pair. They are not a great one.

Anthony Ramos brings real depth to Javi, who could have been a simple traitor character. His moral arc, from corporate stooge to the guy who quits on the side of the road and drives to help tornado victims, is one of the film's most satisfying progressions. Maura Tierney, with maybe fifteen minutes of screen time as Kate's mother, gives the film its emotional anchor. She is Oklahoma personified: warm, resilient, not interested in your drama, here to put food on the table and survive the next storm.

Now for what our audience actually wants to know.

Is Twisters woke? No. Emphatically, refreshingly, deliberately no.

The most remarkable thing about this film is what it does not do. It does not mention climate change. Not once. In a movie about extreme weather made in 2024, the words 'climate change' never appear. Director Lee Isaac Chung was explicit about this choice, telling interviewers he did not want to create 'a feeling that we're preaching a message.' This drove left-leaning media absolutely crazy. CNN ran multiple opinion pieces about the 'stunning silence.' The New York Times called it a 'missed opportunity.' MSNBC accused the film of promoting 'magical thinking.' Salon called it bizarre. The Verge was baffled.

The reaction from progressive media is, frankly, the most compelling evidence that Twisters gets it right. When a movie about tornadoes makes coastal critics angry because it refuses to lecture audiences about their carbon footprint, that movie has made a deliberate choice about who it is for. And it is for the people who live where the tornadoes actually happen.

The film's political subtext is real but never preachy. Tyler's crew wears red and consists of self-taught storm chasers without fancy degrees. Javi's Storm Par team wears blue, comes from Ivy League backgrounds, and is ultimately revealed to be working for a corporate investor (Riggs) who buys tornado-damaged land on the cheap. The red team helps people. The blue team profits from their suffering. You do not need a decoder ring.

But Chung is smart enough to complicate this. Javi is not a villain. He is a good man who got caught up in a bad system, and he finds his way back. Kate is not a coastal elite. She is an Oklahoma girl who went to New York because her trauma sent her running, and she comes home because home is where she belongs. The film's resolution is all three of them, Kate, Tyler, and Javi, starting a business together. Red and blue, working side by side. That is a political statement, but it is one that heals rather than divides.

The rejected Helen Hunt sequel is worth mentioning for context. Hunt pitched Universal a version featuring 'all black and brown storm chasers' from a historically black college, written with Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal. Universal said no. What they greenlit instead was a film set in deep-red Oklahoma with a Christian Korean-American director, a Texas movie star, and zero political messaging. That is a studio making a commercial calculation, and the $372 million worldwide gross suggests they calculated correctly.

Joseph Kosinski, who developed the original story before leaving to direct F1, also directed Top Gun: Maverick. That connection is not coincidental. Both films were designed to serve audiences who had been largely ignored by Hollywood's recent output. Both became massive hits. The lesson is not complicated: make good movies for all of America, not just the people who live within driving distance of a Whole Foods.

The action sequences are genuinely spectacular. The fire tornado at the oil refinery is one of the best disaster setpieces in years. The climactic EF5 bearing down on El Reno while Kate drives into its center to launch her chemical solution is white-knuckle filmmaking. Chung shoots the storms with respect for their power and beauty, influenced by Spielberg's monster movies and Kurosawa's weather cinematography. The IMAX presentation is worth the ticket price on the spectacle alone.

The film's weaknesses are structural, not ideological. The script is thin. Kate's character arc, overcoming her trauma to chase storms again, is resolved too easily and then artificially re-inflated for second-act tension. The romance between Kate and Tyler never reaches the heat it needs. The villain (Riggs and Scott) is undercooked. Ben the British journalist is dead weight. These are the complaints of a B+ movie that could have been an A with a stronger screenplay.

But here is the thing: audiences did not care about those flaws. The 90% Rotten Tomatoes audience score, the A- CinemaScore, and the $372 million worldwide gross tell you everything. People went to see a big, fun, unashamed American movie about brave people saving their neighbors from tornadoes, and they got exactly that. No lecture. No guilt trip. No third-act reveal that the real villain was capitalism or the patriarchy. Just storms, science, courage, and a cowboy with a truck that drills into the ground.

RT Critics: 75% (Certified Fresh). RT Audience: 90%. IMDB: 6.5. CinemaScore: A-. Metacritic: 65. The critics liked it. The audience loved it. The gap tells you who this movie was really for.

Formula: Weighted Score = Severity × Authenticity Multiplier × Centrality Multiplier

🔴 Woke Tropes

Trope	Severity	Authenticity	Centrality	Score
Female STEM Lead	2	High	High	2.52
Diverse Ensemble Cast	2	Moderate	Low	1.4
Corporate Villainy / Anti-Capitalism	3	Moderate	Moderate	2.1
Science as Salvation	3	Moderate	High	2.1
Trauma Processing as Character Arc	2	High	High	1.96
TOTAL WOKE				10.1

🟢 Traditional Tropes

Trope	Severity	Authenticity	Centrality	Score
Heartland Pride / Rural America Celebration	5	High	High	6.3
Traditional Male Heroism	4	High	High	5.04
Deliberate Omission of Climate Change	5	High	High	6.3
Community Resilience and Mutual Aid	3	High	Moderate	3.78
Anti-Elitism / Credentialism Critique	3	Moderate	Moderate	2.1
Returning Home as Moral Compass	2	High	Moderate	1.12
TOTAL TRADITIONAL				24.6

Score Margin: +15 TRAD