‘Twisters’ and the Appeal of the Sequel

It recently came to my attention that several people I count as good friends have been engaged for decades in quietly impassioned romances with the same 1996 summer disaster movie. That movie is “Twister,” the story of a lovably eclectic band of tornado chasers who follow soon-to-be-divorced Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt right into the eye of many storms. It featured a 29-year-old Philip Seymour Hoffman, a storm-tracking device named “Dorothy” and a flying bovine, the sight of which inspires one character to get off the phone with the line: “I gotta go, Julia. We got cows.”

One friend said she watched it every single time she happened upon it on cable. Another said he engaged in an annual viewing. A third said it’s her comfort movie when she’s sick or hung over. Each was eager to extol the merits of the film: its all-killer-no-filler action, its special effects, its talented secondary cast (which, in addition to Hoffman, includes Alan Ruck, Jami Gertz, Lois Smith and the Tár director Todd Field). I rewatched “Twister” and was surprised by how much I loved it, how content I was to witness a terrifying series of disasters and still walk away with the warm feeling I’d just watched a movie with a lot of heart. As Janet Maslin wrote in The Times when the movie came out, “Somehow ‘Twister’ stays as uptempo and exuberant as a roller-coaster ride, neatly avoiding the idea of real danger.”

This week, “Twisters,” a sequel to “Twister,” directed by Lee Isaac Chung, arrived in theaters. I was nervous to see it. I didn’t have a deep-rooted relationship with the original film, but, fresh off my positive viewing experience, I didn’t feel like I needed another chapter. I wasn’t particularly curious about how today’s technology could make the tornadoes even more realistic — extreme weather and its attendant destruction isn’t a boogeyman, but a daily phenomenon. I was a little skeptical of the other phenomenon featured in the film, the actor Glen Powell, who, coming off buzzy performances in “Top Gun: Maverick,” “Anyone but You” and “Hit Man,” seems to be everywhere at once, like it or not.

Why does everything good need to be rebooted? I asked myself on the way into the theater. Why can’t we just make one good thing and then make another new thing that’s also good? Why do we keep reanimating “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”? Why does everyone have to make their own recording of “Landslide”?

Maybe it’s because I was feeling newly smitten with the original movie, or maybe it was Chung’s gorgeous depiction of the Oklahoma landscape near where he grew up, or the fact that the new movie shares the same big heart as the old one, but I fell for “Twisters.” As with the first film, I rooted for science over profit. And I rooted for Powell and Daisy Edgar-Jones’s inevitable romance as I did Paxton and Hunt’s. As Alissa Wilkinson wrote in her review, “The old-school formula feels refreshing: This is an action-adventure-disaster film filled with ordinary people trying to accomplish extraordinary things.”

I’m still not sold on the notion that a sequel or a reboot of a thing we love is always a good idea — I’m still bitter about “Arthur 2: On the Rocks,” and don’t get me started on the 2011 remake with Russell Brand. But I’ll admit to some cautious curiosity about “Freaky Friday 2,” and some real excitement about the upcoming “Spinal Tap II.” Even a sequel that’s sort of terrible can reinforce the love we have for the original thing. That protective feeling we have for works of art that we adore is lovely, a reminder of the joy we get from culture and our ability to engage wholeheartedly with the stuff that moves us.