Twisters explained

What is Twisters about?

Twisters doesn’t repeat the original’s focus on grief. Rather, it positions Kate as someone coming to terms with failure and living with the fear of failure. The film champions a growth mindset as opposed to a fixed mindset. Rather than viewing defeat as a judgment, you, instead, take it as a challenge. Tyler and his team embody the growth mindset, the “I get knocked down, but I get up again” spirit. There’s also an emphasis on responsibility and doing the right thing because you can. That goes for reactive things, like helping people after a disaster. But proactive as well—Kate has potential to tame a tornado, so she bears the responsibility of seeing that through. With all that in mind, Twisters can be a nice way to check-in with yourself. Are you running from fear or right at it? Are you avoiding responsibility or inspired by what you can give to the world? 

Cast

• Kate Carter – Daisy Edgar-Jones
• Cathy Carter – Maura Tierney
• Javi – Anthony Ramos
• Tyler Owens – Glen Powell
• Boone – Brandon Perea
• Lily – Sasha Lane
• Dexter – Tunde Adebimpe
• Dani – Katy O’Brian
• Ben – Harry Hadden-Paton
• Scott – David Corenswet
• Jeb – Daryl McCormack
• Addy – Kiernan Shipka
• Praveen – Nik Dodani
• Marshal Riggs – David Born
• Airport traffic officer – Paul Scheer
• Angry motel guy – James Paxton
• Written by – Mark L. Smith
• Directed by – Lee Isaac Chung

Fear, not grief

Twisters borrows a lot from its predecessor, Twister. For example, both movies open with the hero losing someone close to them in an F5 tornado. For Jo, it was her dad. And for Kate, because sequels always up the ante, it’s her boyfriend and two other best friends. Both characters have a personal history with tornados that drives them to do what they do. 

The original Twister was written by the legendary Michael Crichton and he infused the story with symbolism and thematic layers. Jo’s mission to scan tornados in a way that would lead to unprecedented understanding of their mechanics represents her attempts to bring order to chaos. For her, the tornado symbolized life’s sudden disasters. Car crashes, heart attacks, lightning strikes, random attacks, etc. Anything that disrupts the natural calm with a brutal shock. Anyone who has experienced trauma and tragedy will probably recognize that loss of control and the need to somehow make the world make sense again. You let what happened define you. Rather than accepting chaos for what it is—chaos—and moving forward the best you can. Which is what Bill yells at Jo about. 

So at the heart of Twister is a very resonant and relevant story about grief and trauma.

In Twisters, Kate’s story arc isn’t necessarily about coming to terms with her trauma and grief. Rather, she loses her confidence. She was this prodigy with a goal that would make her a real-life superhero—to kill a tornado using science. The National Weather Service says “In an average year, 800 tornadoes are reported nationwide, resulting in 80 deaths and 1500 injuries.” Consumer Affairs reports tornados “caused approximately $708 million in damage throughout the U.S. in 2022 and more than $1 billion in property damage in 2023.” The ability to completely terminate a tornado would save lives, prevent injuries, and allow entire communities to feel safe and secure.

For Jo, each tornado was a confrontation with her view of the world. For Kate, we see that she’s nervous, but the storm encounters don’t really drive her character. Instead, that role goes to Tyler. Each scene with him progresses Kate’s growth. Its his assurance, joy, and bravado that initially attract her, because those are the things she has lost. Ultimately, what he teaches her isn’t to lack fear. Rather, you face the tornado because you’re afraid, deathly afraid. 

Tyler: I was eight. driving with my aunt. Sirens are going. All of the sudden this vortex just lowers right down in the center of the road. I was just mesmerized. And then I looked at my aunt. She’s got this look on her face. I realized in that moment I was supposed to be scared. [Were you scared?]. Yeah. Yeah I was.

Kate: Wow, the tornado wrangler’s scared of tornados. [After Tyler admits he used to be a bull rider.] You’re scared of tornados but not riding bulls? 

Tyler: Tornados. Bulls. Fear’s the reason you do it. You don’t face your fears, you ride them.

And that’s what Kate eventually does. She gets in the truck, all on her own, and faces her fear by driving into the F5 and “taming it”. 

A perfectionist’s loss of innocence

Ignore tornados for a second. When you look at Kate’s overall issue, her problem is that she got something wrong and that mistake had serious consequences. At the very beginning, she’s a college student with her college friends and they’re trying to prove this big idea they think will, in many ways, change the world. Everything is fun. The seriousness of being so close to a tornado doesn’t really hit the group because of their inexperience and naivete.

What haunts her isn’t the loss of her friends. It’s the blow to her ego. A famous study by Carol Dweck posited two mindsets: fixed and growth. Someone with a fixed mindset believes “intelligence is static”. While someone with a growth mindset believes “intelligence can be developed.” Many high-performing children have fixed ideas about intelligence. Their belief that they were born smart actually causes them to have great results early on. That is, until they suffer a setback. Because they believe in the fixedness of intelligence and ability, those kids (and adults) struggle with failure, because it’s an all or nothing kind of thing. 

The common example was with a puzzle that was impossible to solve. Researchers would tell one group of kids they were very smart and another group that they were hard workers. The “very smart” kids got frustrated faster and gave up sooner. While the “hard workers” stayed calm and stuck with the task far longer. They often found the challenge rewarding rather than, as the smart kids did, infuriating. 

From Dweck: I’ve seen so many people with this one consuming goal of proving themselves—in the classroom, in their careers, and in their relationships. Every situation calls for a confirmation of their intelligence, personality, or character. Every situation is evaluated: Will I succeed or fail? Will I look smart or dumb? Will I be accepted or rejected? Will I feel like a winner or a loser?

Everything we learn about Kate points toward her having more of a fixed mindset. She was always brilliant. Until she wasn’t. And once she suffered that first setback, that first “you got it wrong”, she ran away to New York City in order to get lost in the sea of people and not have to feel special or confront her one failure. 

So what we watch in Twisters is kind of a…privileged story. A very smart person struggles to accept they got something wrong. Then needs a dozen people to tell her she’s great before she finally decides to try again. I know that description minimizes the fact she’s grieving her boyfriend and friends, but the narrative and thematic structure doesn’t emphasize that so much as it does her guilt at getting something wrong. And the self-wallowing she does because she was wrong. It’s very different from how Twister positioned Jo’s grief over her dad’s death. 

Tyler embodies more of the growth mindset. Which ties back to his bull riding background—if you get kicked off, you get right back on. He essentially teaches Kate how to get back in the saddle and face fear and mistakes. You even see this in the contrast between his team and Storm Par. Storm Par is all buttoned up and professional. While Tyler’s crew is rag tag. What they lack in polish they make up for in resiliency. 

There are many, many perfectionists out there who will identify with the “I want to sink into the couch and hide forever” attitude that Kate has after a single failure. And maybe they’ll take inspiration from her journey and the idea that it’s okay to dust yourself off and get back to it. But I wonder if people who have a growth mindset will struggle to connect or empathize with Kate’s fear of trying. Even if they don’t recognize that’s why they’re not connecting with the film.

A sense of responsibility

Yes, Tyler drives a lot of Kate’s character progression. But we also see her galvanized by a desire to do the right thing. On the small scale, that manifests in convincing Javi to drive into a town to help people after a tornado has gone through. Same with, at the end, trying to get everyone to hide in the movie theater and find safety. Or helping the people at the rodeo. 

The thing that gnaws at her is that she has the capacity to do more than simply assist in the aftermath. If her tornado taming solution could work, then they could prevent this kind of destruction from ever happening. While that was, in the past, quite motivating, what’s at stake made her first failure all the more crushing. Every tornado that followed came with a little voice that said “If you were smarter, you would have prevented me. These people lost their homes, lost loved ones, because you got it wrong”

As much as fear could keep Kate from ever trying again, friends, family, and her own desire to do the right thing, to make the world a better place, win the day. In some ways, this makes Twisters a bit of a call to action for the rest of us. The way Twisters positions helping in the aftermath of disaster as a no-brainer reminds the viewer that, “Yeah, you should be the kind of person who does this, too. Who runs to help rather than simply watches from afar.” As much as we’ve focused on Kate, we see a similar story for Javi. He was prioritizing profits over assistance. Kate reminded him that it should be the reverse and he eventually has a change of heart about what he’s doing with his life. The same way she goes from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset, Javi goes from a profit focus to a mission focus. 

Kate being on the wrong side

Twister positioned Jo, Bill, and their crew as the gritty, tried-and-true storm chasers. Compared to their rival, Jonas Miller. Miller had the fancy technology, uniforms, trucks, and team, but he had the wrong spirit. 

In Twisters, Javi’s team is supposed to be a callback to Miller’s. Which makes Tyler like Bill. And sets Kate up to eventually be Jo. 

That kind of reversal is always something I appreciate. It also ties back to what we were saying about Kate being defined less by her encounters with the tornados and more by the people around her. When she was in a positive place (in college), her team, including Javi, had that Bill and Jo energy. When she’s in a negative place, she’s on the soulless professional side that Miller embodied. When she finally gets her heart back in the game, she joins Tyler’s team. That resonates with how he initially calls her “city girl” even though she’s from Oklahoma. 

Viewers can ask themselves which team they feel like they’re currently on, in life. Do things feel more Storm Par? Or more Tornado Wrangler? If it’s the former, is there anything you can add, change, or get rid of to have life feeling more like the latter? 

Did the studio cut the kiss?

Footage has come out that shows a final, romantic kiss, in the airport, between Kate and Tyler. Yet it wasn’t in the movie. Why?

Lee Isaac Chung, the director, actually talked about this to Entertainment Weekly. He said “I feel like audiences are in a different place now in terms of wanting a kiss or not wanting a kiss. I actually tried the kiss, and it was very polarizing—and it’s not because of their performance of the kiss. This [no-kiss shot] was the other option that I had filmed on the day, and I got to say, I like it better. I think it’s a better ending. And I think that people who want a kiss within it, they can probably assume that these guys will kiss someday. And maybe we can give them privacy for that. In a way, this ending is a means to make sure that we really wrap things up with it in a celebratory, good way. If it ends on the kiss, then it makes it seem as though that’s what Kate’s journey was all about, to end up with a kiss. But instead, it’s better that it ends with her being able to continue doing what she’s doing with a smile on her face.”

Those last sentences explain it well. In a movie like Anyone But You, ending with the big romantic kiss makes sense because the movie is a romance. Twisters isn’t. It’s about Kate’s self-confidence and her ability to move past her fear. 

Twister was about Jo’s relationship with grief and how it affected her marriage. The whole movie had a theme of relationships weathering the storms of life. So the kiss there made sense. Not so much in Twisters. 

I’d argue the movie should have leaned further into Ben’s article. Instead of only making bits and pieces visible during the credits, there should have been a whole epilogue showing the article’s reception and seeing the characters, not at an airport, but beginning their next chapter together.

Doesn’t Twisters kind of ruin Twister?

I can’t stop thinking about this. The payoff at the end of Twister is that Jo, Bill, and their team get this data they think will revolutionize the study of tornados. They hope to develop better early-warning systems that will prevent loss of life, giving people more time to get to shelters and the like.

Yet…nothing. No one really discusses the data. Or the impact of the data. We see Kate’s team had, in the opening scene, Dorothy V, meaning they knew of Jo’s research and had access to the tech. But to what end? Javi’s entire storyline is pretty much trying to get the same data Jo got all those years ago. 

Not to mention we see how many tornados hit and no one is prepared? Not only are there not any early-warnings, it seems none of the towns had tornados in mind when building their infrastructure. The news keeps saying over and over again that a once in a generation storm cell will hit the state, then horrific twisters keep touching down, yet a rodeo still happens, little league baseball still happens, parades still happen. It’s pretty outrageous. 

I’m kind of getting off-topic. But it just feels like the sense of achievement at the end of Twister gets completely annihilated by the lack of follow-up in Twisters. Kind of a disservice to the original and a missed opportunity. I guess it would have required coming up with a more inspired story rather than simply repeating the dynamics and beats from the first film. Alas.  

Was Kate supposed to be Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton’s daughter?

Back in October of 2022, Deadline broke the story that Universal was working on a sequel to Twister. Quote: “Sources said that the hope is to bring Helen Hunt back, with a drama that focuses on the daughter she had with the character played by the late Bill Paxton. She has caught the storm-chasing bug her parents had.”

Obviously that was just a rumor from an article two years ago. But Hunt was interested in a sequel that she would write, direct, and maybe act in. However, she said “we could barely get a meeting.” I imagine there was a degree of bitterness when the studio finally wanted Hunt to be part of a sequel they wouldn’t let her contribute to creatively. With the way the screenplay hides Kate’s mom and her last name for a large chunk of the story, you can see what may have been remnants for the eventual reveal of Kate’s parentage. 

Instead, we get what amounts to an anti-climax, a kind of twist for opening weekend audiences, when Kate’s mom is just Cathy. Cathay’s great. Maura Tierney’s always awesome. It’s just Twisters seems to knowingly set-up the question of “Is she the daughter of the characters from the previous movie?” then slyly slides past it. 

Can you really destabilize a tornado?

Science News did an article on Twisters and spoke with several experts. One being Maria Molina, a “meteorologist at the University of Maryland in College Park.” When asked about destabilizing a tornado, Molina said, quote, “I think that was something that maybe, to me, was sort of making me cringe.”

PARs exist!

In the same Science News article, Molina confirmed that NOAA actually uses radar like Javi’s to get scans and that they “do deploy three around it to get that full perspective.” The thing is, the radars are quite large so don’t have to be as close. Meaning the danger is mostly minimal, compared to the movie. 

Are there YouTube storm chasers?

A very brief Google search has revealed Reed Timmer. He has over a million subscribers (same as Tyler). 

Watch Freddy McKinney (155k subscribers) chase down a tornado then stop in the middle of the interstate to observe it. The video is pretty crazy. The tornado crosses the road right in front of him. 

Do tornados really suck people up?

This guy, Matt Suter, has the Guinness World Record for being carried the furthest by a tornado and surviving. He went 1,307 feet. He details the experience here.

In this one, a storm chaser discusses vehicles getting carried by tornados and includes a video of one 419 feet in the air. 

This guy drove into an F3 and you can see how much damage it did to his car.

The National Weather Service does say “The vertical winds in tornadoes are capable of temporarily lifting heavy objects such as automobiles or even people hundreds of feet off the ground.” 

From reports I’ve read, it’s not necessarily that the tornado lifts you up. Rather it throws you around. Also, they say that highway overpasses can actually funnel wind and make it faster, which would be why Jeb and Addy got swept away so forcefully.