The new film makes only a few tweaks to the formula. In Twister, the savant who was lured back into the storm-chasing game was a man played by Bill Paxton. In Twisters, it’s a woman played by Daisy Edgar-Jones. In Twister, this character was a member of the rag-tag rebel band, but in Twisters, she joins the corporate team, because a friend of hers (Anthony Ramos) promises that his cutting-edge monitoring hardware will capture “the most perfect scan of a tornado ever”, which is, apparently, very important.
Still, there’s a chance that she might defect to the other gang, especially as it’s led by a swaggering, absurdly handsome cowboy played by Glen Powell, who seems at first to care about nothing except getting people to subscribe to his YouTube channel and buy his T-shirts, but who could well be revealed to be a brilliant scientist with a sensitive soul.
Another difference between the two films is that, quite far into Twisters, one of the teams decides that they’re not just going to scan tornadoes, they’re going to sap their strength using, I kid you not, the absorbent material from disposable nappies. But essentially the new film is a remake of the old one, so it seems oddly disrespectful that it doesn’t pay tribute to any of the original’s cast. Couldn’t they have got Helen Hunt in for a cameo? Couldn’t they have mentioned the characters played by the late Bill Paxton or the late Philip Seymour Hoffman?
The film’s co-writer, Joseph Kosinski, directed Top Gun: Maverick, another belated sequel that was deeply faithful to its predecessor. But can you imagine how strange it would have been if Tom Cruise’s Pete “Maverick” Mitchell wasn’t in it?
