MOVIE MUSIC UK

Original Review by Jonathan Broxton

Considering how popular the film Twister was in the summer of 1996, I am surprised that it has taken almost thirty years for there to be an official sequel, but thanks to director Lee Isaac Chung, and screenwriters Mark L. Smith and Joseph Kosinski, we now have one to enjoy. Twisters, as it is somewhat unimaginatively named, is technically a sequel, but is actually more of a remake or reimagining of the same basic story. It stars Daisy Edgar-Jones as storm chaser and budding meteorologist Kate Carter who, along with her friends, is using an updated variation of the tech used by Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt in the original film to try to understand and reduce the intensity of tornadoes in Oklahoma. However, after an experiment turns deadly, Kate gives up storm chasing, and five years later she is working at a weather forecasting office in New York. Things change for Kate when she is coaxed back to the tornado front lines by her old friend Javi (Anthony Ramos), who is now working for a large well-funded company and is using military-grade technology to study tornadoes; even more interestingly, while out on the road with Javi, she encounters the self-proclaimed ‘tornado wrangler’ Tyler Owens (Glen Powell) and his ragtag crew. Tyler is brash and arrogant and is apparently only interested in increasing his number of YouTube followers, but there is more to him and his team than meets the eye…

Twisters is a fun summer blockbuster that successfully re-captures the sense of adventure that made the first film so popular. The tornado effects are wonderful, the sound effects design is noticeably outstanding, and there are some interesting touches to the screenplay and story that I appreciated, especially the sub-plot about an unscrupulous property developer who swoops in and takes financial advantage of people who have just lost everything to a natural disaster. The chemistry between Daisy Edgar-Jones and Glen Powell is good, and Powell further builds on the star power and leading man status he has attained through films like Top Gun: Maverick, Anyone But You, and Hit Man, with a another charismatic performance. My only criticism is that I perhaps would have liked a little clearer connection between the two Twister films – a Helen Hunt cameo, maybe, or perhaps making the owner of the company funding Javi’s research a relative of Cary Elwes. This one issue aside, however, I enjoyed it tremendously – it’s certainly a departure from director Chung’s previous film, the quiet indie drama Minari.

The music for the original Twister was by composer Mark Mancina, and was one of the biggest breakout successes of his then relatively early career. For Twisters, director Chung turned to one of film music’s most interesting generational talents, English composer Benjamin Wallfisch. I have been a fan of Wallfisch’s music for years, going all the way back to his debut score Dear Wendy in 2005 when he was still best known for being part of Dario Marianelli’s music team. Although Wallfisch has shown range and proficiency in a huge variety of styles and genres, I think he is at his best when you give him a big orchestra and tell him to write film music in the classic Hollywood fashion. All my favorite scores by him – Summer in February, Mully, A Cure for Wellness, Shazam, The Flash, among others – are written in this style, and now Twisters joins that list.

The score was recorded in Los Angeles with a large symphony orchestra and choir, plus featured musical soloists Joanne Pearce Martin on piano and George Doering on guitar. In an interview with Josh Weiss for NBC, Wallfisch states that he and director Chung initially explored some interesting and complex ideas for the score, including an idea to try to use spiral formations in the musical notation to create a sense of ‘controlled chaos’ that, in musical terms, reflects the structure of what occurs inside a tornado. This initial idea eventually developed into what became the recurring theme for Kate. Wallfisch explains: “I just went to the piano and started to improvise some figures where the hands were kind of interlocked. You quite randomly play with different arpeggio figures there, just to create that sense of something which doesn’t have anything that repeats. There’s this natural randomization. I started developing that and experimented with what might happen if you go in circles with it. You create a spiral. Every time it repeats, it actually repeats upside down, so it becomes like an inverted spiral. And what happens if you play it the same time backwards? Then you can have two spirals going against each other and before you know it, you have a musical analog to the interior of a tornado — or what I would imagine it is. That became Kate’s motif.”

This motif for Kate is introduced in the opening track, “Nature’s Masterpiece,” which Wallfisch says was intended to illustrate the sort of ‘sixth sense’ that Kate has for identifying and understanding weather patterns, and as such has a sort of mystical quality that is really captivating. It often appears in ‘calm before the storm’ scenes where Kate is standing, contemplating the clouds, scanning the horizon, feeling changes in air pressure, observing fluctuations in wind direction. To the untrained eye, her skill feels like magic, and that’s what Wallfisch is capturing through these gorgeous, undulating, spiraling piano textures, some of which occasionally remind me of the similarly lovely piano writing from Summer in February.

Later cues like “Team Kate,” “Tornado Theory,” and the lushly orchestrated “Kate’s Theme” revisit Kate’s motif to excellent effect, placing her directly at the center of the story. Wallfisch often surrounds Kate’s motif with lively, modernistic writing for light strings, twanging guitars, marimbas, and shimmering percussive textures that often remind me of Thomas Newman’s work post-American Beauty. I also like how, in “Tornado Theory,” Wallfisch sometimes transposes Kate’s motif to bubbling electronic tones, illustrating the strong science and technology aspect of Kate’s personality. In addition, some of the post-storm sequences of regret and devastation feature what sound like they may be variations and extrapolations on this central motif, notably “Aftermath,” and the elegiac and haunting writing for prominent cellos in “After the Storm”.

At the other end of the scale, the music for Tyler Owens and his crew of ‘tornado wranglers’ is best described as hybrid orchestral/country rock, the film music encapsulation of pickup trucks and rodeos, a million-dollar smile underneath the brim of a cowboy hat. Cues like “The Race,” the first half of “Complete the Triangle,” and “Everyone Into Position” feature Doering’s swaggering guitars against a bank of rock percussion drum kits and string-led orchestrations. Elsewhere, “She Told Us East” feels like Wallfisch’s take on an Elmer Bernstein classic western, fiddles and guitars and thrusting, driving orchestral lines, just superb.

The other major element in the score is the action music, which tends to accompany the numerous scenes of tornado-based carnage, with trucks ploughing along backroads and through fields in search of their targets, and devastation being wrought upon barns, homes, rodeo stadiums, oil refineries, movie theaters, and whole towns. Interestingly, in context, some of these sequences are presented accompanied by one or more of the various country rock songs that litter the soundtrack, the most prominent of which is Luke Combs’s “Ain’t No Love in Oklahoma”. However, in the scenes that use score, Wallfisch shines; the music in cues like the brilliant “This Car’s Gonna Fly” is full of movement and tense anticipation, string flurries and rattling percussion that gradually emerges into rousing, full-throttle writing for the entire orchestra and choir. Occasionally some of Wallfisch’s choral sounds – wordless moans that drift in and out, echoing like a gust of wind sweeping past – and some specific chord progressions appear to be paying subtle homage to the stylistics that Mark Mancina used on the original Twister score, and this is a fun and appropriate nod.

Other cues like “Shifting Path,” the second half of “Complete the Triangle,” the dark and dangerous-sounding “Rodeo,” the terrifically exciting “Refinery,” the angry and menacing “El Reno,” and the tremendous “Twisters” are full-on barnstormers. Some of the brass writing in these cues is just superb, especially in the latter half of “Rodeo” where the trumpets rattle and reverberate like a swarm of angry insects. I also really love how an action variation on Kate’s motif is embedded deeply into the fabric of “Twisters,” clearly illustrating how her direct intervention and heroism is the key factor in getting the silver iodide and polyacrylite beads to work inside tornado, ultimately saving the town. I will say this, though: although I personally quite like it, I can see how some detractors may consider some of the string ostinatos and percussion sounds in these cues to be a little generic for their tastes, and anyone with an aversion to the contemporary style of Hollywood action may occasionally find some of what Wallfisch is doing here to be disappointing.

Perhaps the only other negative thing I can say about the score is that it doesn’t have a truly prominent, unifying central theme tying it all together the way that Mancina’s score for the first film did. Kate’s motif is really the only recurring idea that’s noticeable in context, and while it is both clever from a compositional point of view and appropriate in terms of what it is attempting to convey about Kate’s personality, I might have also enjoyed a broader and more heroic adventurous anthem of some kind to underscore the successes of Kate and Tyler in the face of the various deadly storms.

These minor issues aside, everything else about Twisters is great. Benjamin Wallfisch is poised to have a stellar year in 2024 – his other films on the docket in addition to Twisters include the sci-fi horror sequel Alien: Romulus and the long-delayed Marvel super hero adventure Kraven the Hunter – and if he can maintain the quality he has shown in Twisters through those scores, we are all in for a treat. While some listeners will naturally retain a nostalgic fondness for what Mark Mancina did with his Twister score back in 1996, Wallfisch’s work here should not be dismissed: the central idea for Kate is intellectually fascinating and contextually appropriate, the ballsy country-rock inflections in the score give it a unique flavor, and a lot of the action music is tremendously entertaining. It probably won’t blow your house down, but it might make you pause to look for a flying cow or two.

Buy the Twisters soundtrack from the Movie Music UK Store

Track Listing:

• Nature’s Masterpiece (1:57)
• Team Kate (1:19)
• Javi (2:49)
• This Car’s Gonna Fly (5:21)
• Aftermath (1:24)
• She Told Us East (2:08)
• Shifting Path (2:56)
• The Race (2:09)
• Complete the Triangle (2:49)
• Rodeo (4:42)
• After the Storm (3:05)
• Tornado Theory (2:49)
• Everyone Into Position (1:32)
• Refinery (3:53)
• Kate’s Theme (3:52)
• El Reno (2:37)
• Twisters (6:39)
• You Did It, Kate (1:52)
• If You Feel It, Chase It (1:23)

Back Lot Music (2024)

Running Time: 55 minutes 15 seconds

Music composed by Benjamin Wallfisch. Conducted by Arturo Rodriguez and Benjamin Wallfisch. Orchestrations and arrangements by Alex Lu, Jason Livesay, Nolan Livesay, Steffen Thum, David Krystal, Evan Rogers, Michael J. Lloyd, and Sebastian Winter. Featured musical soloists Joanne Pearce Martin and George Doering. Recorded and mixed by Alan Meyerson. Edited by Lise Richardson. Album produced by Benjamin Wallfisch.