Like its titular tornados, “Twisters” blasts through a lot in its 122-minute runtime. A summer blockbuster with a surprising amount of brains to match Glen Powell’s brawn, it features subplots that are signs of the times – disaster capitalists; the Faustian bargain between scientists and financiers – and a deluge of imagery portraying lives and livelihoods threatened by nature’s awesome power. But two words you won’t hear from any of its characters are “climate change.
His upbringing included an early run-in with a tornado, when he was forced to seek refuge in a car as his family didn’t have a storm shelter. “When you have brushes with extreme weather as a child, anything that feels larger than life and dangerous … a very big imprint,” he said. “That sense of awe and wonder was something that I really wanted to preserve in this film – that it’s not just a summer blockbuster about running from tornadoes and hiding away,” he added.