Twisters: Another covert remake?!

In the last decades we have been able to see how Hollywood is increasingly betting in safe with sequels, prequels, remakes, spin offs, etc. But recently it is going further, releasing sequels that "pay homage" to the original so much that they become practically a covert remake.

I don't know which movie was the pioneer in this, but I'm pretty sure that the culprit for the spread of this practice is "Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens." This new installment of the saga was a complete success, currently occupying fifth place among the highest grossing films in history, so the studios took note that this is what the public apparently wants in a sequel. At least we can forgive Star Wars a little due to the cyclical nature of its universe.

Since then we have seen many sequels that could easily be a remake: “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom”, “Flatliners”(2017), “Halloween”(2018), “Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker”, etc. Even this year we had some examples, like “Alien: Romulus” and “Gladiator 2”, which were well received, but who knows what they could have been in a world where "Alien: Covenant" and "The Last Duel" had not failed, allowing them not to seek to appeal to nostalgia. However, I think the most extreme and strange case of this year is "Twisters"

But before start speaking badly about the latter, I would like to say that I actually enjoyed it a lot, and I think it is the best of its genre in a long time. When I saw the trailer I was afraid that it would be a bored and grandiloquent CGI spectacle like "Into the Storm" or "Geostorm", but fortunately they knew how to find the balance between the terror, the drama and the fun of the tornadoes. Few scenes of the year entertained me like Glen Powell launching fireworks into the tornado, and few scared me like the initial massacre.

My problem with the film is that it doesn't seem to decide whether to be a reboot, remake or sequel. The protagonists are different from the original, with different conflicts and different dynamics, but if we press play to the 1996 and 2024 film at the same time we could describe its scenes broadly in the same way: We start with the tragic past of a character, we continue with the protagonist returning to the hunt for tornadoes, to move to a dramatic scene of a destroyed town, to the protagonists surviving an unexpected storm, and ending in a climax with an F5 where the team achieves its objective.

This case conflicted me a lot, because what scene should they have taken? It is vital for the tone to have the dramatic scene of the destruction caused by these natural phenomena, as well as obviously for narrative reasons of going "in crescendo" there has to be an F5 tornado at the end. But I couldn't stop thinking about how strange it is that things happen so similar twice, it's like you telling me that "The Karate Kid" is not a remake, oh right...

Anyway, I hope that Hollywood stops making sequels that look more like remakes, because in Twisters there may not really be another way out, but in most cases they could do something riskier and more novel but they prefer to play it safe. Appealing to nostalgia could serve to bring fans back, but a good story without fan service can attract both fans and new audiences, while remaining in cinema history.

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