My brother, sister, and I all saw Twisters together. It was a choice rooted in the warm haze of nostalgia. Every summer of our childhood, the three of us were shipped off to our maternal grandmother’s cottage on the Michigan-Indiana border. It was so deep in the dunes that it didn’t even have a mailbox, much less cable. We managed with a handful of VHS tapes: Rescue Rangers, the 1994 live-action Jungle Book, and. . . Twister. We watched them on repeat while drinking fountain Cherry Cokes we’d bought barefoot at the counter-service shack down the road.
So two decades and an inescapable marketing campaign later, my siblings and I settled into our seats at the Lincoln Square AMC with the sodas that we now paid for with AmExes instead of quarters.
When the lights came up two hours later, we all eagerly agreed: That was great! Better than the original!
My brother had several reasons for this. For starters, the special effects. “It’s amazing,” he said, “the way technology has advanced. You felt like you were in the tornadoes.”
“Totally,” my sister responded. “Also, Glen Powell.”
My brother nodded. “Yes, he’s a good actor. “
“And a maaaaan,” I added.
My brother attempted to segue into questions about the science, but it was too late. His sisters were on a roll: The scene of him in a T-shirt? The scene of him protecting Daisy Edgar-Jones’s Kate from a tornado? The scene of him protecting a mother and child from a tornado? The scene of him protecting an old lady from a tornado?
We said our goodbyes at the subway’s service entrance. Yet my sister and I kept texting. Why didn’t he and Kate kiss? How dare they not kiss? Do we think there’s going to be a sequel where they kiss?
The next day, as I sat thinking about Glen Powell I began to think about why I was still thinking about Glen Powell. I’d seen hundreds of my films with attractive leading men. Why was Twisters any different?
I scrolled back through my messages with my sister. One made me pause: “Glen Powell is so good at being manly, but also sensitive.”