“Twisters” Is The Summer Love Letter To Americana We Can’t Get Enough Of
In the summer of Glen Powell, "Twisters" has arrived to storm the box office.
If you’ve been paying attention to the rise of Glen Powell, you were probably looking forward to Twisters as much as I was. It’s been a drought of a box office so far this summer, and other than the surprise success of Inside Out 2, movie lovers have been desperately waiting for it to rain. Well, rain it has, because action remake Twisters is stirring up exactly the storm of millennial and Gen Z crowds we’ve been waiting for.
The film follows Kate Carter (Daisy Edgar-Jones), a girl with an uncanny ability to predict the weather, who has left her home state of Oklahoma after a tragic tornado accident involving her boyfriend, Jeb (Daryl McCormack). But when Kate’s old friend Javi (Anthony Ramos) begs her to come help him collect data to help save lives in “Tornado Alley,” Kate meets Tyler (Glen Powell), a YouTube celebrity tornado-chaser who might be the guy to help her stop running away from her fears.
The numbers are in: Twisters is the third highest film opening so far this year, far surpassing opening weekend predictions. A remake of the 1996 hit film Twister, starring the late Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt, Twisters has proved a truth we’ve suspected all along: It’s not movie remakes we hate, it’s the bad remakes we can’t stand. With an incorrigibly proud depiction of a rural America that rarely makes it to the big screen and a dynamic cast chock full of charm, Twisters is well on its way to be this year’s Top Gun: Maverick.
Lee Isaac Chung: A Director in Love with Middle America
From the outset, Twisters maintains a respectful and affectionate depiction of the part of our country that doesn’t get much attention: the small towns and wheat fields of middle America. This is due in great part to Twisters’s director, Lee Isaac Chung. The son of South Korean immigrants, Chung was raised in rural Arkansas for most of his life and later attended Yale University where he reportedly studied ecology before switching to study film.
Chung’s deeply felt love for middle America became clear in his breakout, Oscar-nominated film Minari. Inspired by his own childhood, Chung tells the story of a Korean immigrant family who move to rural Arkansas in the 1980s in hopes of building a family farm. Struggling to make ends meet and learning the ways of a land foreign from their own, Minari is a modern reminder of America’s age-old promise: that it will provide a place where people can work to better their life.
But Chung’s devotion to the landscape of middle America, which imprinted on his young imagination, and his study of ecology at Yale University didn’t turn him into an activist. In Twisters, hot button political phrases including “climate change” are notably absent from the script and storyline. When asked why the topic was excluded, Chung responded, “I just wanted to make sure that with the movie, we don’t ever feel like [it] is putting forward any message. I just don’t feel like films are meant to be message-oriented. … I think what we are doing is showing the reality of what’s happening on the ground. We don’t shy away from saying that things are changing.”