Almost thirty years ago Director Jan de Bont (Speed) brought one of nature’s deadliest forces, tornadoes, to the big screen.  Warner Bros. Twister, starring Helen Hunt (As Good As It Gets) and Bill Paxton (True Lies) told the story of a group of storm chasers and their scientific endeavors to learn more about tornadoes to create better warning systems. Liked by critics and loved by audiences, the movie became a bona fide box office success and made people look at cows in a whole new light.  This week, a highly anticipated, stand-alone sequel, Twisters comes to theaters nationwide.

While in graduate school Kate Cooper (Daisy Edgar Jones; Where the Crawdads Sing) devised a substance that theoretically could suffocate a tornado stopping it before it could do any damage. However, while testing the material, it failed to collapse the tornado and the category EF5 event claimed the lives of three of her friends and stopped Kate from storm chasing.  Five years later, the only other survivor of the group, Javi (Anthony Ramos; A Star is Born) comes to visit Kate in New York City and asks her to help him chase tornadoes so he can collect data with the new equipment he has.

After initially turning Javi down, Kate joins him in the field for a week.  At the meeting location, Kate is introduced to Tyler Owens (Glen Powell; Anyone But You), a social media sensation who records him and his team storm chasing.  With a huge following, Tyler is cocky and obnoxious and, while Kate hates him at first, they eventually end up working together to modify Kate’s initial design with the hope of dissipating the funnel.

Director Lee Isaac Chung (Minari) brings together a solid cast and creates some intense scenes but he also misses on a few marks.  First, he intercuts some real weather scenes into the film with clouds moving at an accelerated pace to give a sense of realism.  However, he does more damage than good as the real-life weather is a stark contrast to the computer-generated ones.  He also doesn’t create the kind of tension de Bont did with Twister or perhaps, because we have seen it before, it doesn’t create as much tension as it did the first time around.  The CGI was pretty good but when the tornado takes out some oil tanks, the fire that ensues looks sort of fake.

The incorporation of social media this time around will appeal to younger audiences but it also makes Tyler come off looking a bit bad. While Powell’s smile is disarming it can come across as plastic at times which doesn’t make him look any less like a smug tool.  Edgar-Jones does a very good job and I can see for several reasons why she was chosen.  I don’t think Ramos was well cast and that mistake pulled me out of the film more than once.

The plot was ok for the most part.  It certainly wasn’t as cohesive as the 1996 version and it didn’t do much of anything to swerve away from the tried and true, which may be part of the problem.  Having loved Twister, I got the impression that this repeat was just more of the same and it wasn’t as exciting as the first time around.  Had Kate’s parents been Jo and Bill, it would have tied the second film to the first and would have added a whole other layer to the story and the legacy as a whole but I guess Hunt turned the producers down which is a shame.  It is obvious how the story was originally meant to be but it had to pivot without Hunt’s involvement.

For younger generations, who may not have seen Twister, Twisters is a wild ride and I can imagine how they feel seeing for the first time, just as I did when I first watched Twister.  However, for those of us who saw the 1996 movie, there is a sense of “been there, done that”.

Grade: C

We have a complex relationship with disaster movies. Just look at the discussion about a “ Twisters ” poster, which became a perfect encapsulation of our love-hate tendencies.

In the promo for the film, in theaters Thursday, actors Daisy Edgar-Jones, Glen Powell and Anthony Ramos are standing in front a massive, menacing cyclone. It not only contains various objects swirling in mid-air, from houses to trucks, but also appears to be on fire. Some people wondered why the stars weren’t looking at said tornado. Others said if you’re asking questions like why the tornado is on fire, this movie isn’t for you.

Both lines of thought can be true though. Maybe their coexistence is essential. This makes no sense! Also, sign me up immediately! Disaster movies are almost required to be graded on a curve. And filmmaker Lee Isaac Chung’s entry into the canon is perfectly paradoxical.

It might not be fair, or rational, but there is something about the genre that inspires otherwise reasonable moviegoers to giddily give themselves over to a wild premise — the more ridiculous and illogical the better. There is something to be said about the joy of collective laughter where there wasn’t an intentional joke, or a spirited post-movie debate about the flawed logistics of a plan and exactly how many people have died from being sucked into a tornado. These are the movies that are hard to see clearly the first time but tend to become sneaky favorites over the years.

Such is the case with “Twister,” Jan de Bont’s film about storm chasing and remarriage. The modern collective love for it would probably surprise even the critics who reviewed it favorably in 1996. Part of that is certainly the fact that in the 28 years since it was released we lost both Philip Seymour Hoffman and Bill Paxton. But it’s also just fun to watch with fresh eyes, to see the internet remember (or realize for the first time) that one of the storm chasers was played by Todd Field, the man who would go on to write and direct “Tár.” I re-watched it recently on plane and had a blast. I’d forgotten the insane opening but remembered Dusty’s impassioned foot chant.

There’s been a lot of cautious optimism surrounding “Twisters” that’s felt different from a lot of the reboots and “new chapters” (anything to avoid calling it a sequel) that have come and gone in recent years. Audiences are craving something big and fun, but worried that it won’t live up to their idea of what it should be. This is inherently flawed because “Twister” has earned its reputation, its quotability, across many viewings and many years. “Twisters” we’re just meeting. It’s hard to get too excited about a first date.

But Chung, a filmmaker best known for the comparatively small “Minari,” has made a solid film with escalating action sequences that look great on the big screen. There is once again a crazy opening that gives Edgar-Jones’ tornado-obsessed Kate a trauma origin story. Her hubris in thinking she could “tame” a tornado with science backfired and people died; But five years later her old friend Javi (Ramos) convinces her to come back to Oklahoma’s Tornado Alley to attempt a different kind of study.

The story is credited to Joseph Kosinski (who was once going to direct) and the screenplay to Mark L. Smith (“The Revenant”) and none of them can get the original out of their heads. Yes, these are all new characters (including Powell’s YouTube star storm wrangler Tyler) and the only real connection to the first movie is that the Dorothy technology exists. But it is so referential as to be distracting: Literal lines of dialogue (“I’m not back”); An attempt to make Tyler’s crew a gang of Dustys (which underserves actors like Sasha Lane and Katy O’Brian); Making David Corenswet wear what’s essentially a recreation of Carey Elwes’ baseball cap and earpiece. Don’t they want us to think of “Twisters” on its own terms?

But Chung clearly also had a vision, attempting to ground the insanity in a real place with regionally appropriate styles and music, and deeper characterization. The supporting players were thoughtfully cast. Its leads, Powell and Edgar-Jones, are endlessly watchable with palpable chemistry, even as they’re monologuing about sodium polyacrylate.

I wish I had the ability to know how “Twisters” will play 28 years from now, in 2052. Will the 12-year-olds seeing it this weekend go back to it as a comfort watch? Will it feel like it was part of the good old days of big studio movie making? Right now, it doesn’t necessarily feel like it’s destined for that kind of longevity. And I’d love nothing more than to be wrong about that.

“Twisters,” a Universal Pictures release, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association for “intense action and peril, injury images, some language.” Running time: 122 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.

Netflix’s “Baby Reindeer,” the British drama that became one of the most controversial and buzzed-about series of the year, has now become a major contender in the Emmys race, scoring 11 nominations in the limited series category.

“Baby Reindeer” tells the story of Donny Dunn, an aspiring comedian moonlighting as a bartender, whose encounters with an eccentric woman named Martha at the pub where he works become increasingly uncomfortable and sinister. The series was created and written by Richard Gadd, who stars as Donny. On Wednesday, it nabbed nominations for limited series, actor (Gadd), supporting actor (Tom Goodman-Hall) and supporting actress (Jessica Gunning and Nava Mau). The series also was nominated for writing and directing.

Adapted from Gadd’s autobiographical one-man play — the title card at the start of each episode states that it is “a true story” — “Baby Reindeer” became an instant sensation when it launched on Netflix in April. Viewers were fascinated with its mix of comedy and drama, punctuated with disturbing depictions of sexual assault and mental health. Critics gave high praise to the cast, particularly the performances of Gadd and Gunning. It spent eight weeks on Netflix’s global top 10 list, making it one of the streamer’s most watched series of the year.

The show and the events it depicted also sparked investigations by armchair detectives who tried to figure out the true identities of the characters on the show, particularly Martha and Darrien (Goodman-Hill), a television writer who sexually assaults Donny. In an interview with The Times in April, Gunning called her performance as Martha, who stalks Donny, an “interpetation” of Gadd’s vision and said she never asked him about her real-life counterpart.

However, in the months since the show’s premiere, Fiona Harvey, a 58-year-old Scotswoman, claimed to be the basis for Martha in an interview with Piers Morgan on his YouTube channel. She sued Netflix in June, seeking $170 million in damages for what she called defamation and emotional distress. A Netflix spokesperson said in a statement about the suit: “We intend to defend this matter vigorously and to stand by Richard Gadd’s right to tell his story.”