Twister 2: Two Twisters!

I saw the original Twister movie in the theaters back in 1996. It was a fun special effects extravaganza. You had the intrepid tornado hunters who got the band together for one last job… they were going to *MEASURE* the tornado. They were going to do this by the use of Dorothy I:

So it’s kind of a disaster movie, kind of a monster movie, kind of a mad scientist movie. The special effects were out of this world and the rest of the movie was kind of… well, it was pleasantly dumb. The scriptwriters knew that they needed to add some sort of antagonists to our protagonists and so they added a rival team of stormchasers but, get this, the rival team of stormchasers had: CORPORATE BACKING.

1996 was a lifetime ago.

Anyway, the movie was pretty okay. I mean… it’s a movie about tornados. What do you want?

Well… maybe you’ll want a sequel.

Twisters.

If what you’re looking for is a special effects spectacular about tornados that has a whole bunch of tornados in it, well… Twisters has a whole bunch of tornados in it. If that is what you are looking for, this movie will deliver.

But now I’m going to start spoiling.

Still here? Okay.

One of my dear friends said that we should catch an afternoon matinee of Twisters and catch a good, old-fashioned, special effects spectacular.

We open with a fun little scene where a little band of 2019 tornado hunters are following in the footsteps of their mentors (I assume their mentors… they’ve got a Dorothy V in the trailer they’re dragging around) and they’ve got a theory about how tornados might be slowed down somewhat. Basically, you just gotta fill them up with sodium polyacrylate.

“Sodium polyacrylate?”, you ask. “The stuff that they use in diapers?”

The very same! Well, as it turns out, three of the five tornado hunters quickly learn that they’re not in a science movie, they’re in a monster movie. Kate and Javi are the only survivors.

Flash forward to today. Our intrepid heroine Kate is a meteorologist in New York City.

Well, Javi shows up and asks Kate to come back to Oklahoma for One Last Job: He’s got a bunch of satellite dishes and if he can set them up just right, he can get a full 3D model of a tornado.

But… well. Javi has a Corporate Backer. But there’s another ragtag team of tornado hunters. They’re out there doing it for Facebook! And twitter! They’ve got a million followers on YouTube! And they do dumb stuff like “shoot fireworks into the tornados that they drive into”.

They sell merch.

Well, Kate has a preternatural ability to read the clouds and she knows which is going to start dropping the *GOOD* tornados. We establish that she’s better at reading clouds than Tyler and we establish that the team that has Corporate Backing is kind of skeezy, while the Social Media Team is kind of not bad. I mean, they’re macho and that’s bad. But if you can get past that, they try to do good out there. Help people. They give back, you know?

Anyway, we establish that the Corporate Backing team is not only buying the bones of destroyed homes and businesses of under- and un-insured regular people, we find out that Javi wants to use his team of tornado hunters to get an image of the tornados instead of trying to use science to drop tornados in their tracks.

That’s right: Kate wants to use sodium polyacrylate to *KILL* tornados. None of this “trying to measure them” crap. We’re past that. We’re going to kill them now.

Anyway, they come up with a plan where they will shoot sodium iodide up into the tornado in order to seed the clouds and make it rain and *THEN* they’re going to send up 1500 kilos of sodium polyacrylate to kill the tornado *DEAD*.

“Now Jaybird”, I hear you ask. “I’m not really a Greenpeace kinda guy who is really into the whole environmentalism thing”, I hear you say. “But isn’t it kind of a bad idea to send 1500 kilos of a massively superabsorbent powder into a *FREAKING TORNADO* TO BE STREWN ABOUT THE WHOLE GOSH DARNED COUNTY?!?!@?”

Yeah, well. The movie doesn’t really get into that. Instead, I’ll ask “Don’t you *CARE* that tornados kill people?” (My light research tells me that there hasn’t been enough studies of what large amounts of it added to soil will do.)

I mean, seriously, I got some major “we could have sold this ointment for 300 denarii and given the money to the poor!” vibes from this movie. Yeah, well… there’s gonna be a tornado next month too and next year and I would really appreciate more 3D satellite images of them.

Hey, the poor you will have always. What you want is a 3D satellite image of a tornado. Seriously. If you could figure them out, you might be able to figure out how to deal with them in the future without having to come up with 1500 kilos of sodium polyacrylate every time there’s a thunderstorm until all of the water is in the sodium polyacrylate that covers the ground where the crops used to grow.

Anyway, before you answer the question of whether *YOU* care that tornados kill people, let’s get back to the special effects: The special effects are really good. Like if you want to see a scene where a tornado is coming into town and fixing to destroy a movie theater? This movie has you covered. If you have a handful of weather-related phobias, this movie will not treat you kindly. You’re going to feel out of breath watching that wind blow and those cars and fences and people get picked up and strewn about.

But you get a movie that, if you took away all of the special effects, would make a good Hallmark movie. The big city meteorologist goes back to her hometown. She joins up with a modern-day Pecos Bill. Sure, he can tame a tornado… but can he tame her heart?

Oh, and what happens when you dump 1500 kilograms of sodium polyacrylate into an F5 tornado that you have just fired sodium iodide fireworks into?

Would it be better for someone who lost everything to not have someone offer money for the dregs of his house? Would it be better to get an image of the tornado for study than to drive a truck back to town and yell “a tornado’s coming!”?

Well, I won’t spoil the answer to that last question, but you’ll go home happy. Or, I suppose, walk out of the theater saying “the special effects are pretty good, but the rest of the movie was awful. Seriously.”

My friend told me “I’m sorry I dragged you to this, I guess.” “No!”, I said. “Thank you very much! Please invite me to the next Sunday matinee!”