115: Twisters Is Just Aliens Set in Oklahoma

Twisters is out this weekend. As a movie, it's fine! It's a dumb movie that throws a lot of jargon around to sound smarter than it actually is, although on the flip side it's a legasequel that manages to reference the original without feeling like it's being unnecessarily jammed into some shared universe. It also happens to be, beat for beat, almost exactly the same story as James Cameron's Aliens. I recognize that writing a book about the Alien movies has cooked my brain, and I don't care. The resemblance is hilarious and uncanny. (Mild spoilers for Twisters and Aliens ahead.)

Twisters starts with a young woman named Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and a rag-tag crew of fellow students at Oklahoma State University trying an experiment to collapse a tornado. Kate has a sense for predicting the weather that borders on the supernatural, and she's the de facto leader of the group. The experiment, run from a rickety old van with jerry-rigged technology, doesn't go well; not everyone makes it out alive. This is the parallel to traumatic backstory portion of Aliens, which sets the stakes and recaps Ripley's (Sigourney Weaver) backstory: she's the last surviving crew member of the Nostromo after their ship (which has seen better days) picks up a malevolent alien life form.

In Twisters, Kate retreats to New York City and the safety of the National Weather Service, monitoring weather patterns as a meteorologist far from her home state. She seems sad and alone and has no desire to go back to the field, but she's convinced to do so by an old friend who says he can save people from tornadoes with her help; her decision is triggered partly by a nightmare about the fateful tornado from the opening scene. In Aliens, Ripley is stripped of her flight officer status and works a lonely job loading cargo, a demotion from her previous job hauling cargo in the wilds of space. Ripley is convinced by a friendly company man named Burke (Paul Reiser) to return to the planet where she first encountered the alien because—Burke claims—her expertise will help The Company wipe the aliens out. Ripley only agrees to go because some seventy families have taken up residence on the planet, and because she's haunted by terrible nightmares about her first encounter with the alien.

Kate's return to Oklahoma is in a shiny new company car with all the necessary gadgets for tracking and measuring tornadoes; Ripley's return to the planet is in a state-of-the-art spaceship bristling with weaponry and populated by gung-ho space marines. On her return, Kate finds herself surrounded by tornado chasers who treat every storm like a lark; Ripley's shipmates act as though they're invincible. Both movies are invested in special effects intended to convince the audience of the dangers of tornadoes and xenomoprhs, respectively, and both movies intend to give the audience a thrill ride while they're at it.

Kate gets a ribbing, followed by grudging respect, from one of the most outlandish tornado chasers, a man from Arkansas named Tyler (Glen Powell) who underestimates her at first. Ripley's briefing is disregarded by the space marines, though she quickly earns the respect and eventual admiration of Corporal Hicks (Michael Biehn), who like Tyler sports a Southern accent. Ripley's experience with the xenomorphs and Kate's instinct for predicting tornadoes both prove useful in the field; both women manage to save a little girl from certain death. Both women triumph over their respective fears and traumas by facing their monsters (embodied by aliens and tornadoes) head-on.

I'm not sure how intentional the similarities between the two movies are. The pluralizing "s" at the end of each title certainly feels more than a little coincidental. Maybe it speaks to the formula of big-budget summer movies more than anything else, but I found myself amused by the resemblance.

What I wrote:

For Seeing & Believing, I reviewed Twisters. (The take over there is a straight review, as opposed to this newsletter.)

Also a reminder: I'm in the upcoming edition of Broad Sound, available for preorder here. The issue drops at the end of the month!

What I'm watching:

For another writing project, I've been watching back episodes of LOST, probably the first TV show I ever loved. It's been good to go back and see the stuff I missed: for example, Michael Emerson is great and I didn't appreciate his performance nearly enough the first time around.