25 Aug Twisters (2024)

Surrey with the Fringe on Top

It might be enough to build a movie around special effects that don’t involve a fight or monsters. These usually fall into the catastrophe category. The key to that category it seems, is the noir necessity that the catastrophe happens to a regular guy (usually a guy) who is just living his life, is nothing particularly special, but who rises to match the challenge.

This is more along the lines of ‘Close Encounters’ where a soul seems uniquely tuned to a special force, is attracted to its wonder — and the movie flows from that. This is at root a story about how a young (amateur?) scientist is simply in tune with tornados. She just knows. If that doesn’t work, the movie fails. So we have tornados from four perspectives: 1) in her soul where she ‘just knows’ how they form and we can see her looking at skies. 2) from a safe distance, with funnels like we see in photos 3) from an unsafe distance, usually with chase vehicles 4) ‘in the deep’.

Unfortunately, the latter three seem to have been handled by three different special effects teams. There is no visual coherence among the three, which would be acceptable in a normal film. But it is all supposed to relate to that first visual intuition: this woman senses these things deeply. I appreciate that this is hard cinematically, and they have to struggle with whether the end is her reconciling with her genius-of-nature (which goes deeper than love for a person) or whether it is a love story with a dumb cowboy.

The fact that they couldn’t pull this off makes it a failure for me. But there’s a deeper issue. They decided to go full Oklahoma. Now, the state so far as the story demands is perfect. It is flat, mostly rural with the kinds of towns that when damaged would serve the story. As with most of the US, these are simple people who when they suffer we empathise. That’s all that the story needed. But they went full cowboy. There’s a rodeo. There are perhaps two dozen country (formerly country and western) songs. There’s a cowboy storm chaser.

The state is an unhappy mix of three stupidities: it is dominated by oil; it is fully unrecovered as a slave state and all that carries with southern politics and Trumpism. But they also drive a cowboy narrative, one largely fictional but deep. This is baggage in a movie like this. We don’t need the cultural context — tornadoes are from primal forces not identity narratives. We don’t need the story of a naive remote farm girl from a single mom who is escaping a subordinary life. This is all lazy, laziness, both from the background narrative and its appropriation in the script.

There is one thing I liked, which is a bit silly. The climax has a powerful tornado headed to a group of innocents holed up in a movie theatre. Forget that these would be storm-wise in real life — here they are as useless as sheep. Our hero has separated from the two relatively powerless males and gone into danger to save the town with her untested invention. All that’s as we expect.

The film being shown is the original Frankenstein. As the theatre gets more damaged and the threat increases, the screen (and wall behind) are sucked away and where we had a monster movie, we have the monster tornado. While our sweet Kate is fighting, the threat quite literally has folks being sucked into the ‘movie’. It is a simple device, and too blunt to be celebrated. But someone knew something about narrative folding.

Posted in 2024

Ted’s Evaluation — 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.

IMDB