Twisters

Nominative determinism is an interestingly entertaining, if obviously silly concept: the idea that people’s jobs, their lives, are determined by the name they get a solid two decades before they typically find their way into a profession. A quick Google finds the likes of racecar driver “Scott Speed”, meat manager “Brad Slaughter”, and archaeologist “Dr Graves”. And to that list, I think we might now be able to add the likes of ‘Twisters’; a vapid, loud, shouting swirling mass of chaos calling itself a film, with a centre so empty, one could get lost in the vast echoes it reverberates.

Given the very heavy marketing campaign that surrounded the release of this film, the top-notch acting backgrounds of its three leading actors (admittedly only two of whom actually get any prominence in trailers and posters), and the very simple nature of its story, one would think that the creative team might have been able to pull at least something mildly entertaining out of the bag. But, alas. The closest this ever comes to entertainment is letting one play a game of ‘Is That A Real Cloud Or A CGI One?’ It lambasts around the Oklahoma countryside with no serious intention of trying to form a cohesive narrative or character arcs, preferring to shout at the top of its voice “LOOK OVER HERE, HERE’S A BIT SWEARING VORTEX OF WIND! LETS GO AND LOOK AT IT CLOSE!”. It gets so tripped up over its own feet proselytising at the audience around looking at what it can show them hoping that in the mess of everything, you wont notice the gaping lack of heart and soul in its middle, one so clearly absent from each scene of destruction that one walks out of the cinema wholly questioning its lack of presence: and that would be climate change!

So many times our main characters comment on the ever increasing frequency of the occurrence of twisters, making sure that we see full well the scale of the damage, the token background extra’s lives ruined, but never once acknowledging the one true cause for this. It even goes so far as to try and pin the real villain as being a local property tycoon who is clearly the one causing all the death and ruin! But for a story so focused on the rampaging effects of a world rapidly on the brink of ruin, it would have had a front row seat to educate people on this, but instead actively tries to avoid it – so much so that one would start to think that the Republican Party had written the script…

It’s a shame really, because Edgar-Jones and Powell are so infinitely charismatic in other projects that when they arrive in this it all just seems to slip away, with neither of them ever managing to step a foot into a second dimension, just endlessly trapped in a plane so thin that one would use it for an Apple advert.

If searching for something entertaining to pass the time away, one would be better served counting shopping trollies found at the bottom of the Grand Union Canal.