'Can’t Take the Home Out of Oklahoma': A Movie Review of Twisters

I grew up in Tornado Alley in western Oklahoma. This was before the invention of cell phones or the Internet, and people in my small town were warned about an approaching tornado by sirens. As a small child, I recall being awakened in the middle of the night by the urgent moan of a siren blasting through loudspeakers mounted on telephone poles throughout the town.

My parents didn't have a basement, so they would bundle up my siblings and me and take us next door to Mrs. Nightingale’s house. Mrs. Nightingale had a concrete root cellar filled with home-canned fruits and vegetables that smelled of musty concrete. This shelter had a sheet metal door that my father invariably left open. He would stand in the doorway of our cave-like refuge, ready to close it if we heard the freight-train sound of an approaching tornado. Fortunately, we never did.

If the tornado siren blared while I was at elementary school, Mr. Vaughn, the school principal, would order all the children to huddle in the hallway, crouch on the floor, and fold our arms above our heads. It was the same drill the school practiced for nuclear war, but for a six-year-old, a tornado was much more frightening than an atomic bomb.

Our Oklahoma sky would turn green when a tornado lurked on the plains, and the air would become still and heavy. No one can see that green sky without being frightened.

Last night, I went to the movies to see Twisters, starring Glen Powell and Daisy Edgar-Jones. I warn you that the film is a full-on rom-com, so if you are one of the millions of Americans who hate rom-coms, don’t see it. It’s also an action movie full of flying cars and trees and a lot of fun to watch while munching on a box of popcorn,

I liked Twisters, the 2024 remake, better than Twister, the 1996 original. The romance between Tyler and Kate, played by Powell and Edgar-Jones in the current film, was more believable than the rocky relationship between Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt in the 1996 version.

None of the main characters used profane language in Twisters, making it appropriate for kids to see. Glen Powell was devilishly handsome, and Edgar-Jones played a chaste and determined young storm chaser with a scientific theory for stopping the deadly tornados that terrorize the Plains states.

Twisters includes "Out of Oklahoma" on its soundtrack, a song written by Lainey Wilson. As an Oklahoman who got a degree from Harvard, this line from the lyrics rings true: "Can’t take the home out of Oklahoma, so you can’t take it out of me.”

I assure you that tornados do not occur daily in Oklahoma, even in Tornado Alley. In fact, I've never seen an active tornado. 

In Twisters, however, cyclones pop up with the regularity of a cross-town bus.  Day after day, adrenaline-charged storm chasers recklessly drove through farmers' fields,  whooping, hollering, and tearing up the landscape. 

If Glen and Daisy had driven through my father’s wheat field in a heavy-duty truck, they would have found storm chasing far less entertaining. In fact, they would discover that my father’s Browning shotgun was far more dangerous than any category-five tornado.

Tornado over Kansas, painted by John S. Curry (1929)