Refreshingly not a legacy sequel, Twisters is just one of those good, old-fashioned late sequels, bringing 2024 CGI to add more twister to the 1996 original.

We meet the plucky team led by Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and her boyfriend, who are chasing tornadoes for an experimental university project in the hope of securing funding. Most of them have a death mark all over them, and so it proves when the tornado they’re chasing grows to an EF5. All but two of the team are lost, with Kate broken and retreating behind a desk to track weather systems in New York City. When, five years later, the other survivor, Javi (Anthony Ramos), rocks up with an opportunity Kate can’t refuse.

Ravi manages to drag Kate back into the field, well, some field in Oklahoma, where unprecedented tornado activity is attracting attention, while Ravi’s mobile tornado radar company, Storm Par, hopes to prove their triangulation technology. Only, it’s the presence of charismatic tornado wrangler Tyler Owens (Glen Powell) and his team that starts to expose the murky funding behind Storm Par. When the teams encounter a mile-wide EV5, loyalties, relationships, roofs and Kate’s rejigged tech all come under the ultimate pressure. 

Twisters is a superbly formulaic, simple slice of a disaster movie. But as you’d expect from a story from Joseph Kosinski (director of Top Gun: Maverick), it puts its likeable cast through beats or terror and catharsis with pin-prick precision. Within the first 20 minutes, it serves up a tornado set-piece, gives Kate her challenge to overcome, compels her to get back in the field and meet the inevitable rival/opposite-going-on-romance that is Tyler Owens. 

The rival teams are compelling. The straight-and-slick corporate-branded crew versus the seat-of-their-pants tornado wranglers sets up a good stall and allows Kate to make her crucial swap halfway through. Also well-plotted, even if it’s sometimes a bit overwrought, is the challenge of tornadoes as both something to be scientifically combated and respected as a very real threat to human life. “Part science, part religion,” as Tyler puts it at one point. 

With a background in dramatic features, Lee Isaac Chung makes sure Twisters has a good mix. It’s not too showy, the picture is happy to get gloomy and shady, ready for the digital twisters to spin in. Some touches are sublime, often when Kate and Tyler are together. There’s a sublime if quick bit of mise-en-scène when the pair get to know each other at a rodeo, and later when they’re re-trying Kate’s experiment in a tornado. 

It may hit all the beats in a predictable order, but Twisters make sure everything is covered, bar, perhaps a flying cow. There’s the loss, the prodigy, the maverick Han Solo, the brewing relationship, the corporate sell-outs, the switcheroo. There’s even a quick joke about South London. The third-act climax doesn’t disappoint, with both teams caught in a brewing firenado that broadens into a gigantic EV5. It even has the chutzpah to demolish a movie theatre. 

A solid film, then, and a good summer blockbuster. It was wise to take the loosest approach to following Twister; the legacy could always sit, or spin, in the tornadoes themselves. But it is slightly more fun in the build-up of sparring personalities and storm-flirting than when it’s in the path of a twister.