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Some first-generation crisis videos were real blunders for their actors. D. W. Griffith’s 1920 melodrama, “Way Down East,” which features the decisive rescue of a woman swept away by an ice floe through raging currents, filmed on a genuine river after a genuine snowstorm. The film’s star, Lillian Gish, suffered frostbite that affected her She kept her for the rest of her life, but it didn’t stop her from taking on physically dangerous roles. For Victor Sjöström’s 1928 drama “The Wind,” Gish was set in the Mojave Desert: “The sand hit me through 8 airplane propellers,” he later wrote. in his autobiography, and “ran the risk of having his eyes gouged out. “The biblical flood in Michael Curtiz’s 1928 film “Noah’s Ark” was so intense (involving at least six hundred thousand gallons of water) that the film’s star Dolores Costello lost consciousness and reportedly contracted pneumonia; According to rumors, the extras present at the scene were killed.
One sign of progress was the progression of special effects and specialized stunts, which made immediate advances in the 1930s. Life and limb should not be risked in the making of a film. But the result is that we no longer revel in on-screen crisis as viscerally as the icy waters of “Way Down East. ” The modern public is aware of hoaxes that simulate great dangers. Movies want to find artistic tactics to create emotions. “Twisters,” like its 1996 predecessor, “Twister,” features little onscreen that would terrify viewers; The tornadoes in question look like what they are: elaborately cunning illusions. Instead, both films overwhelm audiences to nervous exhaustion with their sheer volume of storms, with a roaring soundtrack and percussive musical scores so relentless that one imagines timpani in the fields beating frantically along whirlwinds, like the Orchestra of Count Basie playing in the desert while the sheriff appears in “Blazing Saddles. ” “Twisters,” directed by Lee Isaac Chung, modifies the original premise and introduces new characters while remaining visibly original. The films’ family resemblance includes a foundation in survivor’s guilt and a romantic comedy element. But, more than its predecessor, the new film moves the concern from the sensory realm to the emotional realm.
The 1996 film begins with a woman named Jo watching her father die while trying to save her and her mother from a tornado. The story then introduces Jo as an adult (played by Helen Hunt), running around as a tornado tracker. The project involves testing and deploying a sensor formula in a tornado’s funnel that will lead to an early precautionary formula, the kind that may have saved his father’s life. With the new “Twisters,” the protagonist, Kate Carter (Daisy Edgar-Jones), has a more direct ethical duty for a tragic twist of fate in her past. At the beginning of the film, Kate is a student from Oklahoma with a supernatural sense for predicting the weather and a smart head for science. She is leading four other scholars on a tornado-tracking expedition to conduct an experiment that she says aims to “tame the tornado” by releasing polymers into its funnel. But, in the course of their approach, three of his friends died.
Five years later, Kate is applying in New York as a behind-the-scenes meteorologist for a television network when the only other survivor of her ill-fated expedition appears: Javi (Anthony Ramos), who, meanwhile, has become an expert in military radars. . He now runs a startup that works with 3D imaging of tornadoes and invites Kate to return to Oklahoma for a week during peak typhoon season so she can advise her team on how to circle the funnels with portable radars. Although Kate has given up on tracking tornadoes, she realizes that Javi’s mission can save lives and agrees to a short-term collaboration.
In the decades between the making of “Twister” and “Twisters,” tornado hunting became a spectacle on social media, a phenomenon the new film uses as a plot detail. The assembly station of the Array Javi team is full of amateur trackers interested in it. for fun, as well as a like-kind professional: Tyler Owens (Glen Powell), a trained meteorologist turned social media star braggart, which he calls a “tornado. “Wrangler” and hawk T-shirts emblazoned with his own face. Kate temporarily dismisses him as a frivolous, self-promoting intruder. Tyler, a populist adventurer whose team is full of talented but modest demons, disdains the well-funded, scientifically staffed expedition Kate is a part of.
Kate then discovers that there is more to Javi’s business than meets the eye. The clinical studies of it are not entirely disinterested. She finances herself through a real estate shark named Marshall Riggs (David Born), who buys land from other people who lost their homes in the tornadoes. (Riggs uses Javi’s knowledge to succeed at crisis sites before his competitors. ) Javi’s acceptance of Kate as true falters, and as he shrinks before her eyes, Tyler emerges as more than just a dog. exposure. Powell, with his irrepressible but self-aware charm, is perfectly suited to the role of a preening showman with an untested intensity of character. The romantic end result is predetermined: the story, like that of any other opposites attract romantic comedy, will depend on how Tyler and Kate triumph over their mutual disdain.
There is a moral size in “Twisters” emblematic of our time. The previous film showed the tornadoes shamelessly, not with a graphic vision of the blood they leave behind, but without scruples about giving them an impressive appearance and even, at times, a little laughing, as in the famous photo of a cow in flight. “Tornadoes,” on the other hand, make tornadoes look horrible. Whatever terrifying good looks they may provide are subordinate to the widespread destruction they cause. Tornado tracking is described less as a harmful game and more as war journalism, a career that inherently addresses large-scale social issues and is connected to the death and anguish of others. Engaging in it as a fun pastime is unconscious, even sinful. Tyler, a professional who knows better, has some major renovations to make, and Kate’s search gives him the opportunity to do just that.
Javi’s radar assignment only promises a greater early warning system. But Kate, starting with her calamitous school experience, has something much more ambitious in mind. Rather than simply interpreting tornadoes, their purpose is to modify them, using chemicals to minimize their strength and make them more dangerous. less dangerous. Tyler comes to recognize how smart Kate seeks to be and becomes her ultimate loyal collaborator.
“Twisters” features a host of supporting characters, adding Sasha Lane as a rock-n-roll drone operator, David Corenswet as a laconic scientist with a mean side, and Maura Tierney as Kate’s firm, self-assured mother. Chung guides the actors in vigorous performances, but the characters serve as little more than elaborations of Kate and Tyler’s central drama. Ramos plays Javi, torn by conflict, with a frenetic sense of urgency and inner turmoil. He said that he had planned to use a Southern character in the role, but that Steven Spielberg, one of the film’s executive producers, asked him to use what Ramos called his own “New York Latin dialect. ” But nothing in “Twisters” suggests how Javi went from city life to chasing typhoons, and the other character arcs are just as sketchy. We don’t know how Kate feels after leaving Oklahoma, or what Tyler hoped to gain, if anything, from his social media fame, or, for that matter, what almost everyone thinks or wants to say: about anything else he is not the existing one. action. The script, written by Mark L. Smith and based on a story by Joseph Kosinski, leaves the characters empty, and it is Edgar-Jones’ functionality that suffers the most. Kate’s invention, passion, and pain are central to the plot, but given little room for expression. Even more than “Twister,” which gave a hint (however slight) of a romantic story in the story of a failed marriage, “Twisters” maintains an inflexible barrier between the characters’ personal minds and their public actions.
This impersonal exaltation of heroic deeds leaves an unexplored dilemma at the base of the film. A key detail, in the traumatic opening sequence, raises questions about the ethics and dangers of clinical research. When Kate, Javi and their companions manage to release a polymer cup into the funnel of a tornado, they realize that instead of shrinking, the tornado is growing. The scene introduces the heartbreaking option that the control not only failed, but actively caused harm. However, throughout the film, Kate, for all her guilt over her friends’ deaths, never thought that her technique for taming the tornado could have turned her into a Dr. Frankenstein of meteorology whose miscalculations created a more monstrous storm. Whether she harbors a glimmer of doubt or a glimmer of clinical awareness about this, the film never suggests it. Instead, she acts like a porcelain heroine waiting for a white knight to give her more confidence and further encourage her spirit of experimentation. For all its concessions to the times, “Twisters” doesn’t make much headway. ♦
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