“FINDING PURPOSE BY HELPING PEOPLE”
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW:
TWISTERS is an outstanding adventure romance. It has appealing characters, powerful drama and funny moments with lots of heart. The music is wonderful. The storm scenes are intense, harrowing and exciting. TWISTERS has a strong moral, redemptive story about helping people, saving lives and making sacrifices. It also has a positive view of people living in the American heartland. However, TWISTERS has some foul language and scary moments. So, MOVIEGUIDE® advises caution for older children
CONTENT:
(BBB, CC, PP, E, LL, VV, S, A, M): Dominant Worldview and Other Worldview Content/Elements: Very strong moral worldview with strong Christian, moral, redemptive content and values about helping people in distress and not taking advantage of them, doing the right thing, sacrifice, a comment is made that studying tornadoes is a combination of science and religion, and people give their lives and risk their lives for a plan to find a scientific way to make tornadoes dissipate, plus some Pro-American, patriotic values include singing the Star Spangled Banner with American flags waving proudly at a rodeo, and movie has a positive view of people living in the American heartland, and one or two lines of dialogue in one scene promotes the false radical environmentalist idea that storms and floods and droughts are getting worse (they are not, according to the data); Foul Language: 18 obscenities (six “s” words) and six light profanities, plus two appeals to God or the Lord; Sex: No sex, but some romance, there’s a romantic kiss, and woman has a brief nightmare of her dead boyfriend waking up next to her; Nudity: No nudity; Alcohol Use: Brief alcohol use; Smoking and/or Drug Use and Abuse: No smoking or drugs; and, Miscellaneous Immorality: Heroine feels guilt about making a mistake that may have resulted in the deaths of three friends but she overcomes it, and man works with a real estate developer taking advantage of people who’ve just lost their homes because of tornadoes, but eventually he repents and quits doing that.
MORE DETAIL:
TWISTERS is an adventure romance about a young guilt-ridden tornado expert who has a groundbreaking scientific idea about making tornadoes dissipate and begins a complicated rivalry with a cocky, thrill-seeking storm chaser impressed by her keen sense of how tornadoes form, grow and move. TWISTERS is a crowd-pleasing, outstanding adventure with appealing characters, good cast chemistry, a wonderful musical score, powerful drama, and a morally uplifting, redemptive story about helping people, saving lives and making sacrifices, but it has some foul language and intense scenes involving powerful, destructive, deadly tornadoes.
Daisy Edgar-Jones stars in the movie as Kate Cooper. Five years ago, she and her college friends and colleagues were chasing tornadoes in Oklahoma to prove an idea Kate had about “taming tornadoes.” If successful, the idea could help scientists follow large tornadoes and make them dissipate before they cause massive destruction. However, a tornado they were following turns out to be much stronger than she thought. As a result, three of Kate’s friends die, including her boyfriend.
Five years later, Kate is staring at TV screens in New York City, helping the National Weather Service track tornadoes. Kate stays in New York. Feeling loads of guilt about what happened, she never returns to Oklahoma, not even to visit her mother.
One day, Javi, the only other survivor of that deadly day in Oklahoma, visits New York to see Kate. He tells her that after their friends died, he joined the military and began working with a sophisticated weather radar device. He tells Kate they’ve now reduced those devices to tabletop size. He plans to set up three of them to triangulate all the data they possibly can from each tornado. Javi tells Kate he needs her expertise in tracking tornadoes and asks her to return to Oklahoma to help him for one week. However, Kate refuses.
Happily, though, Kate knows that data from Javi’s machines might help save lives. So, she changes her mind and comes.
In Oklahoma, Kate starts helping Javi and his team follow tornadoes with the three fancy radar devices. The first day, Kate encounters a cocky storm chaser named Tyler, who runs a YouTube podcast with his team. They seem to be in it just for the thrills and the money they can make selling T-shirts, hats and other merchandise.
Nothing can be further from the truth, however. Soon, Tyler is helping Kate prove her idea about “taming tornadoes.” Eventually, Kate, Tyler and even Javi find themselves squarely in the path of multiple storm systems threatening towns in Central Oklahoma, in the center of “Tornado Alley.”
TWISTERS is a crowd-pleasing, outstanding adventure romance. It has appealing characters, some powerful drama, and funny moments with lots of heart. The music perfectly complements the story and characters with great country music songs and a wonderful score. The chemistry between Daisy Edgar-Jones and Glenn Powell as Kate and Tyler works well. Talented veteran actress Maura Tierney as Kate’s mother brings a lot of warmth into the story.
Even better, TWISTERS has a strong moral worldview with strong moral, redemptive values and content. For example, a person notes at one point that following and studying tornadoes is like a thrilling combination of science and religion. Also, the story strongly supports helping people survive tragic circumstances, not taking advantage of them, doing the right thing, and making sacrifices. The heroine regains her sense of moral purpose to help people, a purpose that involves risking her life for them.
That said, TWISTERS has some foul language and intense scenes involving powerful, destructive, deadly tornadoes. So, MOVIEGUIDE® advises caution for older children