This summer I went to see a movie in the theater.  This was sort of a big deal for me because, between one thing and another, I hadn’t been to a movie theater in many years.  (Also, the last movie I saw in a theater was…ah…disappointing. (IT WILL LIVE FOREVER IN MY MIND IN INFAMY!))  But I saw that Twisters was in theaters, and a) an action movie is usually a safe bet at a theater—the big screen makes action movies more fun even if they’re not super awesome; and b) I saw the original Twister in a theater when I was a kid and have really fond memories of just how much fun that was.

Conclusion: I’m so glad I went!  I really enjoyed it.

Often, I’m extremely nitpicky—and I’ll probably talk about a couple of nitpicks here—but on the whole I really enjoyed it, and it was pretty much exactly what I was hoping for out of a go-see-a-movie-in-a-theater experience.  It was super fun, I’m sure I’ll be snagging it on DVD as soon as I dig into family Christmas shopping (yes, I still buy DVD’s—then they’re mine), and once I do it’s gonna hold equal place with the original when I’m poking at my shelf looking for something good to watch.

But outside the fun, I found myself coming back to certain choices this movie made and thinking, ‘That was pretty great,’ and, ‘That was pretty great, too.’  And I realized that most of these choices, really, were all writing choices, that one of the big things that made Twisters a great movie is that it has good bones.

I’d like to dive into what some of those choices were (and also a titch of why I think they were well-executed—good choices mean crap if the execution sucks).  So, if you haven’t seen Twisters and you want to avoid all spoilers, then probably you should stop here.  But, I am going to try to keep it spoiler-lite, so if you don’t mind a little discussion before you see a show, read on!

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slight spoilers ahead
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Okay, the first thing that really stood out to me as a nice change from the norm was that the two love interests never kissed on screen (and it was implied that they never kissed until after the end of the movie, even).  Yay for a little bit of realism!  Most people who are kind of antagonistic when they first meet (but are trying to act like adults) and then are really busy for the next few-days-to-a-week, aren’t going to suddenly fall into each other’s arms just because they’ve reached the end of the climax scene of the movie their life happens to be.

Some of the reviews complained that Daisy Edgar-Jones and Glen Powel didn’t have as much on-screen chemistry as Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton of the original Twister.  But I disagree.  Some people prefer to do their romance sweet rather than steamy, and it’s hard to be romantic when you’re really busy and trying not to die.  Also, in the original Twister, the two main characters had been previously married.  It made sense that they really would want to fall into each other’s arms when things got scary—they’d had a lot of practice at that.  These two new characters didn’t have that practice, and the screenplay for Twisters didn’t force them to jump their relationship ahead as though they had.  Hoo-rah.

At the same time, the romance portion of the story was not neglected (and still did manage to account for two of the three most glaring we’re-doing-this-for-the-story-not-because-it-actually-makes-sense bits of the movie).  Real romance is about being really excited about another person and what that person is like, and is often grounded in things two people have in common.  So, these two both grew up in rural environments, and are happy, for example, to have fun taking in a rodeo together.  And, they’re both scientists!  Speaking as a scientist married to another scientist, it is pretty amazing when you find another person you can really just talk to, who understands what you’re saying and who gets excited about the same nerdy and esoteric things you get excited about.  It’s great.  And it was really lovely to see that sort of blooming relationship depicted in this movie.  And, bonus points for the execution here: This choice also made for a two-fer in Twisters because it let the writers advance the science/looming-threat storyline at the same time as the romance-story line, so, plot-wise, things never got too crowded.

Alright, moving on.

The next, seemingly small, but-I’d-argue-is-fundamentally-important choice that I really appreciated about Twisters was that the main character’s mother was actually a character in the story.  No one can deny that Aunt Meg was a great character in the original Twister, but why was she an aunt character rather than a mom?  Jo’s mom was, supposedly, a character present in the prolog of Twister, and we were given no reason to expect her to have vanished in the interim…and meanwhile Aunt Meg was definitely a mother figure…

I think at the time the original Twister was made, there were general assumptions about certain tensions that would, supposedly, have to exist within any mother-daughter or mother-ex-son-in-law relationships, and those tensions would have been at odds with some of the fun-character uses that script had for Aunt Meg.  And honestly, some of those assumptions were never directly tested in the new Twisters script, either, because Kate’s mom is only present in small ensemble scenes in this movie, never among even Kate’s original crew, the way Aunt Meg was in Twister.

But, at least Kate’s mom is there.  And she’s really, really not just a bucket-of-stereotypes standing in for a character.  She runs a farm.  She’s willing to give her daughter space while she works through some of the trauma she’s experienced.  She has wry opinions.  She very clearly has a life outside of being a mother to her daughter.  Twisters didn’t dwell on her, but it did let her exist and be real.  Again, hoo-rah.  And thank-goodness for non-invisible mothers.  We need some role-models, y’all.

Okay, next up is something that I thought was a nice touch in Twisters, even if the execution strayed a little bit into Anna’s-feeling-nitpicky territory: The reporter character.  The reporter was the hilariously-fish-out-of-water character for Twisters, similar to the fiancé, played by Jami Gertz, in the original Twister.  Aside from providing some comic-relief, both these characters were stand-ins for ‘normal’ people, who would be horrified (or sometimes just annoyed and discomfited) to find themselves in such extreme situations.

In the original Twister, fiancé Melissa is never allowed to move outside that character definition (although a) Jami Gertz’s acting is awesome and memorable, and b) one must applaud her exit scene, in which she shows that, in the real-world, she is probably way more of a grownup than would-be-husband Bill).  In the new Twisters, the reporter character (sorry, I’m having a hard time pin-pointing his name—I’ve only seen this movie once so far) gets to have some character growth over the course of the movie.  So, while he starts off a bit clownish, he definitely gets to be counted in the hero group by the end.  That wasn’t super necessary, but I appreciated it.  I didn’t like the idea of this guy being stuck as ‘ridiculous’ through the whole show.  (And he didn’t have access to the sort of already-developed relationship with other characters that would have let him participate in some sort of ‘deep insight’ the way Melissa got to.  So, Twisters made a good choice here for finding a way to allow his character a little grace.)

However, this does lead into some of those nitpicks I just can’t resist talking about.  It starts with this: One of the pillars of Twisters definitely seems to rest on the question of how to be good people who care about other people.  This is a good core principal that I’m happy to see promoted in a big, action movie, and the way it’s applied, it shifts things toward the ‘family-friendly’ camp without smothering you in it.  All good.  But.

Science is not the opposite of caring.

This movie knows that.  Really, truly.  Just like the original Twister, it places emphasis on how scientific pursuit can be strongly driven by caring, and often is.  But it still struggles with the tricky nuances.

In this movie, the good-guy characters (either from the start, or once they’ve made it over into good-guy territory) always drop their professional duties in order to go help people.  In many ways, this is indeed admirable.  But, in the way so common to the movies, that which is admirable is presented as the only moral choice that could be made.  The one character who refuses to make that choice flatly states that his choice is based on his not caring about people.  ugh.

What about the fact that they really could miss out on a maybe-never-again scientific opportunity if they drop what they’re doing?  They’ve stated over and over again that they’re pursing this science TO HELP PEOPLE.  And what happens when a reporter stops reporting?  He might definitely help people in the moment, and he’s got to make that choice for himself.  But maybe then he won’t have what he needs in order to convey to the outside world the severity of the need, and the importance of funding the science to address it.  Just today, in reality, my boss was talking to us about the importance of good marketing for getting and keeping science funding in this country.  You might think that the important things will always get the funding they need, but that’s not actually true.  Sadly, it’s not how the real world actually works.  (So a reporter’s work can be really important work, too.)

There are some other nitpicks I could go into about, for example, the pack of weirdly all-male scientist extras that are sort of just there for background scenery.  But they’re a much smaller part of the story being told in Twisters, so we’ll let it slide for now (while occasionally side-eyeing it later).

Instead, to wrap up, I’d like to bring this back around to one more element I really quite enjoyed about this movie, which was the setting!

Obviously, there’s not a huge range of choice here, given the basic premise, but I loved that there was a lot of love poured into the Oklahoma setting.  I’m a big fan of cool settings in general, but I’m also very much a fan of rural settings, having grown up in Montana and still being very much in love with the West in general.  I’m very happy to see contemporary rural settings celebrated, and Twisters definitely did that.  It used the landscape (and cloudscape) to great effect in its cinematography.  The choice of a rodeo for the midway-mark disaster scene gave it some really great color and specificity—why not throw some love for the setting into the show when picking out set-pieces?!  And, they used this setting-love to great effect to avoid a major nitpick I have about so many disaster movies, which is that some movies seem to think the stakes have to be super-personal to matter at all (the M.C.’s girlfriend has been kidnapped by the bomber! It’s Aunt Meg whose house has just be walloped!  Etc.).  The writers of Twisters avoided that unnecessary fallacy by showing us that, of course, everyone in Oklahoma mattered to these people.  (And yes, there were some super-personal stakes/consequences in the prolog.  And that was plenty.)

So all that, I just have to add, meant the show-makers of Twisters got to pick a really fun set-piece for the final disaster scene.  No M.C.’s house had to be involved—they picked a movie theater!  And we got to watch that movie theater being torn apart while inside a movie theater!

It was great fun.  And great writing too!