'Twisters' Thankfully Drops an Annoying Sequel Trend
Reap the whirlwind.
This Friday sees the release of Twisters, a sequel to the 1996 Jan de Bont film Twister starring Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt. The new film is set in the present day and follows rival storm chasers Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and Tyler (Glen Powell) as they track down a string of tornadoes across Oklahoma.
If you’ve been watching blockbuster sequels since about 2015, you may spend a large chunk of the movie wondering, “When is Helen Hunt going to show up?” (Bill Paxton sadly passed away in 2017) or, “When will we see any of the storm chasers from the 1996 movie?” This expectation was set with the onslaught of the legacyquel, which kicked off in a big way in 2015 with the release of Creed and Star Wars: The Force Awakens. The formula was simple: if you’re going to do a new installment of a dormant franchise, you put young, hot stars in the lead roles, and you put the actors from the original movie in the supporting roles. Whether this formula draws an audience is debatable (people showed up for a relaunch of Scream, but sadly skipped Blade Runner 2049), but Hollywood felt that it was a way to get old and new audiences on board with some fairly straightforward connective tissue.
I’m pleased to say that Twisters doesn’t bother with that. No disrespect to Helen Hunt (even though I recently learned she was mean to my cousin during the making of Twister!), but I don’t think her character Jo Harding is so indelible that you cannot make a movie about tornadoes without her. The movie is called Twisters; we know what we’re signing up for, and I’m glad that halfway through the movie we don’t see our lead characters pull up to Jo’s house and say, “Please, you’re the only one who knows how to chase tornadoes.”
The legacyquel is, in its own way, the tyranny of lore. We’ve now tied fandom to esoteric knowledge, so the more backstory you know, the “better” a fan you are. But Twisters doesn’t need lore. It doesn’t need old characters guiding young characters. It just needs a few little nods (there’s a prop in the film’s prologue that immediately ties the two movies together), and you’re golden. We can get to telling this film’s story rather than setting an onus on the audience that they have to do some homework before showing up at the theater.
There are times when I think you need to rest on the old characters because they’re the backbone of the series. I’m not as excited for Alien: Romulus as others in part because I think the Alien movies need Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) to thrive (I think the reason Prometheus and Alien: Covenant whiff is because Ridley Scott wants to make movies about the android David, but he feels obligated to include xenomorph stuff). But there’s only been one Twister movie, and while it had good characters, they weren’t so essential that it’s impossible to make a movie about stormchasers without them.
So when you see Twisters (and you should since it’s fun and makes full use of the theatrical experience), don’t worry about when characters from the 1996 movie show up. They don’t, they won’t, and you can just ride the whirlwind.
Recommendations
Someone tried to assassinate Trump over the weekend, and while Democrats call for unity, Republicans are now saying that if Democrats want unity, they need to silence all criticism of their political opponent and politely cede the election to people who love political violence. As A.R. Moxon points out, the GOP loves imposing this double standard. Political violence is bad when it’s aimed against them, but perfectly acceptable and even laudable against Democrats (I’m old enough to remember Trump saying a Clinton election would require “Second Amendment people.”). You can also see this in how they approach free speech (conservative speakers must be embraced on every college campus, but we also have to ban books about gay penguins) and laws (Clinton had to be locked up for questionable email practices, but it’s fine for a Trump judge to throw out his documents case).
Anyway, before we decide to simply throw up our hands because a guy took a shot at Trump, maybe we should consider which party has been turning up the temperature for the last eight years.
Okay, let’s lighten the mood a bit. There are finally some great 4Ks and Blu-rays on sale on Amazon. Here are some you should add to your collection.
Note: I get a small percentage of sales made through my Amazon Associates links.
What I’m Reading
It’s kind of funny that the Kindle marketplace is so successful when it’s filled with so much junk. I think if you use it to get a new release book, you’re fine, but if you go into the public domain, you’re kind of on your own. And to be fair, those books are only a few dollars, and maybe paying for them is dumb in the first place because, again, public domain. But I bought a collection of H.P. Lovecraft stories, and the formatting was so janky, which isn’t the first time I’ve run into that problem with older novels on Kindle. Anyway, at this point, I’ve learned my lesson.
As for the Lovecraft stories themselves, it is bizarre to see his racism and his talent as a writer side-by-side. Like we can make fun of J.K. Rowling all day for naming characters “Cho Chang” and “Kingsley Shacklebolt,” but nowhere in the Harry Potter books is she like, “And here’s why the sub-human race of trans people was coming to destroy Hogwarts.” Lovecraft gets very racist even for an early 20th century writer. I can’t deny his ability to write stunning syntax or weave powerful imagery, but I do feel like when we talk about “Lovecraftian horror,” the follow-up should be, “Do you mean Cthulhu or the way he talks about Black people?”
In other reads:
How did the Case Against Alec Baldwin Get So Far? by Jonathan Mahler [The New York Times] - Last week, the case against Alec Baldwin for involuntary manslaughter on the set of Rust was dismissed with prejudice. While I wish this profile went more into the particulars of the case, it’s more interested in culture war nonsense and two-dimensional characters with Baldwin as the duplicitous movie star and the prosecutors as self-serving opportunists. Perhaps that’s all true, but a woman is dead and deserves better than her death serving as the inciting incident between egotists.
Lost Turns 20: The Real Reason a Tropical Island Melted Everyone’s Brain by Javier Grillo-Marxuach [Vanity Fair] - Lost is one of my all-time favorite shows, and I like how Grillo-Marxuach (one of the show’s writers in its first two seasons) pinpoints why the show excelled where imitators failed and the myriad reasons why it would be impossible to recreate the show today. The thought of a 22-episode network series that people tune in to week after week is an impossibility now. Even streaming series that manage to lure viewers every week typically top out at 10 or 13 episodes for a limited series. Lost was special, and I’m eager to return to the island when Emily St. James and Noel Murray’s complete critical companion arrives later this year.
What I’m Hearing
To co-host Peter Shamshiri’s credit, he acknowledges at the outset that this isn’t a best-selling book or something that garnered mainstream cultural cache. But it’s worth a listen to hear about Richard Hanania’s worldview, a guy who clearly swam in and drank deep the waters of white supremacist message boards work to pull their bile into the mainstream of the Republican Party. Being a conservative thought leader largely consists of wearing a nice suit and finding some polite euphemisms.
What I’m Playing
This newsletter got far more political than I expected (although I suppose that will happen when one of the candidates almost gets shot a few days before their nominating convention), and yet I’m feeling utterly exhausted by politics. I’m backing away from social media (there’s so little utility in it or joy; instead it’s largely a grabbag of election speculation and rage), and need other things to distract me.
This means since I’ve finally finished up all the trophies for Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, I’ve now gone back to Astro’s Playroom, which I find utterly delightful and charming. It’s probably one of the best platformers I’ve played despite its relatively short length, and I’m incredibly excited for the sequel, Astro Bot, which arrives in September.