Of all the recent efforts to reboot 80s and 90s cinema properties, Twisters is one of the most successful, and really exceeded my own expectations. Written by Mark L. Smith, from a story by Joseph Kosinski, and directed by Lee Isaac Chung, it’s not a sequel to the 1996 film but rather a stand-alone narrative about a collection of tornado-chasers in the present. Right from the start, though, Chung continues the first film’s intimate connection between tornado and media. We begin with Kate Carter, a meteorologist played by Daisy Edgar-Jones, and her close friend and colleague Javi, played by Anthony Ramos, chasing down a storm system in Oklahoma’s “Tornado Alley” to test a new technology for dissipating twisters. On the one hand, it feels like the primal link between the tornado and the camera has degraded since the original film – all the recordings are made on sophisticated digital devices and it’s possible to remotely track and monitor storms as never before (Javi boasts that “I can watch a moth fly a mile away”). On the other hand, all this new technology only emphasises the inherent unknowability of the twister, which in this case ends up sucking the entire meteorological crew, apart from Kate and Javi, into the void, when it unexpectedly intensifies into an E5. In the words of Timothy Morton, then, the twister is still a hyperobject – too great to be contained by human cognition – and more mysterious amid all the data deployed to track it.

More specifically, Twisters inverts the balance between climate and media that drove the first film. There, Jan De Bont used weather as a way of grasping towards a digital universe that was volatile, mercurial and resistant to human perception. By contrast, Twisters uses digital media to gesture at a climate situation that is volatile, mercurial and resistant to human perception. Whereas media exceeded climate in the first film, climate exceeds media in the second film. The two main characters in Twisters, Kate and “tornado wrangler” Tyler Owens, played by Glen Powell, have different but complementary strategies to deal with this situation, each of which corresponds to what David Grusin and Jay David Bolter describe as the twin components of technological mediation: immediacy and hypermediation. Tyler opts for immediacy, using livestreaming to turn tornados into linear narrative events that are uploaded to his YouTube account. He also organises tours so that other people can create their own livestreamed documentation. By contrast, Kate opts for hypermediation, collaborating with Javi to work on “the most perfect scan of a tornado ever” using cutting-edge digital technology that requires three sensors to be triangulated around the twister. Like Tyler, she and Javi are attempting to visualise the storm in their entirety but they believe it can only be achieved through a composite of images rather than via a linear unbroken stream.

This difference in attitude extends to the way that Kate and Tyler characterise the tornado. For Tyler, tornados are spectacles. He treats twisters as rides, strapping himself in, bolting his truck in place and firing flares and fireworks up through the vortex. By contrast, Kate and Ravi always wear goggles, and mantain a safe distance from the storm whenever they can. Between these two approaches – immediate and hypermediated, scientific and spectacular – Chung suggests that we live in an era when climate is more known and unknown than ever before. While Kate’s approach is scientific and Tyler’s approach is experiential, they both believe in the inherent unknowability of the tornado. In a pivotal scene, Chung cuts between their twin paeans to the inherent mystery of the tornado as they converge on one of the rarest of all meteorological events, a twin tornado: “It’s a mix of what we know and everything we can’t understand…part science, part religion.” Only at this point does Tyler finally break his livestream and ask his cameraman to stop filming, so he can fully contemplate the storm.

From this point onwards the tornado becomes a point of consensus for a coastal-heartland romance, as Chung imagines a heartland that is not only amenable to climate change discourse but to the cutting edge of climate research. This involves gradually revealing that Kate and Tyler have affiliations with both heartland and coastal mindsets. When Javi reunites with Kate after the disastrous death of their friends, he’s incredulous that she’s moved to New York, and yet Tyler immediately pins her as a coastal elite and gives her the nickname “city girl” as a result. In the key moment in their burgeoning relationship, Tyler takes Kate to a rodeo and explains to her that he transitioned from a steer wrangler to a tornado wrangler: “Tornados, steers, same thing.” It’s at this point, however, that Kate also reveals that far from being a city girl, she’s actually a local, and grew up in this same region of Oklahoma as well. Just as Kate and Tyler are bridging their coastal and heartland sensibilities (for Tyler’s YouTube audience come primarily from the coasts and beyond) a tornado suddenly descends. They flee to a motel where a local girl behind the counter denies that a serious storm is occurring and an obnoxious out-of-tower threatens to give the motel a bad review if his air-conditioning isn’t fixed immediately, despite the fact that a tornado is descending. We see,  in these two characters, the worst of heartland denialism and coastal arrogance, and between those poles Kate and Tyler realise they actually have a fair amount in common. It doesn’t hurt either that the toffee-nosed coastal sensibility is absorbed by an English journalist doing a story on Tyler.

Chung thus affirms the possibility of a climate consciousness arising in the heartland and insists that some kind of coalition is needed between the coastal and flyover states if global warming is to be adequately addressed. Hence the dual movement that ensues towards the local and the global. On the one hand, Kate returns to her family farm, to an old-timey rendition of “Can’t Take the Home Out of Oklahoma.” She also heads back in time by watching a video she made with her old boyfriend Jeb, played by Daryl McCormick, one of the researchers to perish in the opening scene. The style of this video is not unlike that of Tyler’s livestreaming so it makes sense that Kate once styled herself the “tornado tamer,” in an echo of his own designation of “tornado wrangler.” Once more, then, we sense that Kate and Tyler’s trajectories need not be mutually exclusive. At the same time, this movement to thus local is accompanied by a yearning to tackle global climate head on. Kate’s mother Cathy, played by Maura Tierney, encourages her to move home only so she can complete her thesis on “Disrupting Tornado Dynamics,” the principal research for which took place in the family barn, where all of the requisite equipment and data is just waiting to be collated and analysed.

It’s only a matter of time before Tyler arrives at Kate’s farm, and there the two imagine a new entity, a “tornadeo,” that combines climate consciousness with the ethos and imagination of Middle America. Twisters thus reimagines the American frontier as the climate wars, not unlike Taylor Sheridan’s Those Who Wish Me Dead, and so forms the best vehicle to date for Powell’s cowboy crossover appeal. The importance of local sensibilities in combating global events is only enhanced when Kate learns that Javi has been working all along for a corrupt real estate developer who only wants to predict tornado paths so he can swoop in on those who lose their homes. Nevertheless, Javi, like Tyler before him, and like Kate herself, is not a lost cause, despite making some mistakes along the way. For the enduring message of Twisters is that there is no pure way to address climate; some science is needed, to be sure, but so is a sense of spectacle – and this fusion is also the film’s own project. By the time we arrive at the third act, Kate has assembled a Fast and Furious-styled crew to help her test her hypothesis about halting tornados, which has received some helpful input from Tyler, who, it turns out, also has a degree in meteorology. Interestingly, Chung suggests that the broader space of climate change is also dissonant and uneven, producing mise-en-scenes that messily combine progress and regress, as when an errant tornado turns a “clean” wind farm deadly.

This sense of the messiness of climate paves the way for an extraordinary finale, in which Javi is trapped at the threshold between a tornado and a petroleum refinery, the cusp at which the storm is about to become a firestorm. This is the very frontier of climate catastrophe, the primal scene of global warming, and yet Chung also suggests that this unimaginable prospect can be wrangled into a cinema commensurate to climate change too. As the firestorm front closes in on a nearby town, with all the shelters full, everyone flees to a movie theatre, even though it clearly “isn’t built to withstand what’s coming.” The screen blows out, the epicentre of the storm approaches, and row after row of seats are sucked into the void, in a kind of manifesto for 4D climate cinema. At the moment at which the theatre is about to collapse Kate’s tornado taming works, the wind dies down, and the survivors are able to walk through the hole left by the screen, which only seconds ago was a vantage point on the approaching eye of the twister. In its fusion of science and spectacle, urgency and absurdity, this is genuine climate change cinema, at once a singular event tailored to the film’s narrative (a “once-in-a-generation outbreak in Oklahoma”) and a looming threat that is “coming after people we love…getting worse every year.” As the plural title suggests, these weather events are both singular and systemic, surprising and expected, and the film’s genius is to alternate between encounters with discrete natural disasters and with the unimaginable totality of climate itself.