Twisters

I have been looking forward to Twisters ever since the first trailer dropped during the Super Bowl so I was really excited to see it last night at a Thursday preview.  It is a crowd-pleasing summer blockbuster and I thoroughly enjoyed it.  Kate Cooper (Daisy Edgar-Jones) is a storm chaser trying to prove her theory about a method for taming tornadoes with her crew, including her friends Javi (Anthony Ramos), Addy (Kiernan Shipka), and Praveen (Nik Dodani) and her boyfriend Jeb (Daryl McCormack), but when she miscalculates the strength of the storm only she and Javi survive.  Five years later Kate is now working for NOAA in New York but she is still tormented by the deaths of her team members.  However, Javi now has military-grade equipment and corporate sponsors and he lures her back to Oklahoma to collect data during a particularly devastating storm season.  Javi's business partner Scott (David Corenswet) is not happy to have her on their team and things are further complicated by the appearance of Tyler Owens (Glen Powell), a reckless storm chasing YouTube personality known as the "Tornado Wrangler," his crew, including Boone (Brandon Perea), Lilly (Sasha Lane), Dexter (Tunde Adebimpe), and Dani (Katy O'Brian), as well as a British journalist (Harry Hadden-Paton) who is writing an article about him.  Kate begins to suspect Javi's motivation and eventually joins Tyler after he convinces her to resume her research.  It goes without saying that the action sequences are amazing with incredible visual effects and immersive sound design that put the audience in the middle of tornadoes as they wreak havoc on a motel, a rodeo, an oil refinery, and a movie theater as well as fields and entire towns (see this on the biggest screen possible).  Having said that, the story is actually much better than I was expecting and I was particularly moved by the emphasis on the casualties of these cataclysmic storms.  I think Edgar-Jones is really bland in the role but Powell has enough charisma to spare (even though I didn't really buy the romance shoe-horned in at the end) and the supporting cast is a lot of fun despite not having much to do.  I should mention that, other than a cameo from "Dorothy," this is a standalone sequel to the original so don't expect a lot of nostalgia. I recommend it as an entertaining movie to watch with a big tub of popcorn!