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Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton outrun a tornado in 1996's Twister.Image: Universal Pictures
In 1996, when Twister was released, “climate change” didn’t quite carry the very real, very doom-laden weight that it does now. These days, dangerously freaky weather grabs alarmingly regular headlines, so the time feels ripe for an update—and here comes Twisters to bring us killer tornados aplenty.
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Note that Twisters isn’t being marketed as a sequel to Twister, Jan de Bont’s summer blockbuster that starred Helen Hunt and the late Bill Paxton as married but estranged storm chasers, along with a huge ensemble cast that included Cary Elwes, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Alan Ruck, and Jami Gertz. That film was notable for cutting-edge special effects that brought its terrifying storms to life—as well as that awesome scene in which a tornado rips up a drive-in movie screen right in the middle of the axe-chopping scene in The Shining.
In December, Glen Powell—who’s part of a new huge ensemble cast that also includes Kiernan Shipka, Daisy Edgar Jones, future Superman David Corenswet, Anthony Ramos, Brandon Perea, Daryl McCormack, and Maura Tierney—told Vogue, “It’s definitely not a reboot. We’re not trying to recreate the story from the first one. It’s a completely original story. There are no characters from the original movie back, so it’s not really a continuation. It’s just its own standalone story in the modern-day ... humans versus weather is a very universal idea—how powerless we really are in the face of these cataclysmic forces.”
You gotta wonder: is Twisters’ apocalyptic weather even in the realm of science fiction anymore? Directed by Oscar nominee Lee Isaac Chung (Minari), with a script by Mark L. Smith (The Revenant, Overlord, The Midnight Sky, The Boys in the Boat), Twisters arrives July 19.
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