tracking pods inside the funnel in Twister.) Unfortunately, Kate underestimates the storm’s intensity, and most of her team dies in the effort.

Fast forward several years, and Kate has a safe desk job at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Javi (Anthony Ramos), the only other survivor from Kate’s original crew, persuades her to accompany his new team on their current assignment to figure out a better way to track the movements of tornados and thus warn people in their paths more quickly. Javi wants Kate’s help because she’s very good at guessing where to station the team’s vehicles to get the best measurements. When the group arrives in Oklahoma, they meet their competition. It’s a social-media-savvy crew of “tornado wranglers” led by affable cowboy Tyler Owens (Powell). His slogan is: “If you feel it, you ain’t dead.” Tyler and his crew film their escapades, getting as close as possible to a tornado and pulling off stunts like shooting off fireworks inside the funnel. These videos earn him millions of social media followers.

Twisters pulls off an interesting role reversal regarding the competing crews compared to their counterparts in Twister. There, Hunt and estranged husband Bill Paxton led a lovable group of misfits in ramshackle vehicles. Their competition was smarmy Cary Elwes, a fellow scientist who had stolen Hunt’s work and headed a much better-equipped team. Now, Kate’s team has state-of-the-art equipment and a faceless group of technicians (led by future Superman David Corenswet). The lovable misfits all work for Tyler, who turns out to be a really nice guy. (He uses the proceeds from his merchandise sales to help tornado victims.) By contrast, the financier behind Javy’s team is a real estate mogul who visits disaster sites and makes lowball offers to families whose homes have been destroyed.

The second half of Twisters is primarily a series of set pieces featuring tornados wreaking havoc on a rodeo, an oil refinery whose destruction causes one storm to catch fire, and the real-life town of El Reno, OK (home to one of the most intense real-life tornados on record). Besides the fire tornado, the audience sees the rare spectacle of twin tornados in one scene. In the movie’s grand finale, the mother-of-all-tornados threatens to destroy the town while most residents huddle inside a movie theater for shelter. Kate and Tyler get friendlier between these escapades, especially when they visit Kate’s mother (Maura Tierney, in another scene that parallels a similar moment in Twister).

The CGI effects in Twisters are a generation more advanced than those in the earlier film and more realistic. However, director Lee Isaac Chung never fully capitalizes on the technological capabilities at his disposal. Viewers see little actual destruction, with no scenes reminiscent of the one in Twister, in which Lois Smith’s house was torn apart. Instead, we often get sound effects, shots of blowing wind, and the suggestion of destruction, followed by aftermath footage. You would expect that type of effects work in a much lower-budgeted film. And it really shortchanges an audience that is coming to see just such destruction.

Chung, who received Oscar nominations for writing and directing the domestic drama Minari, is much more comfortable showing the human cost of tornados. After each set piece, we get effective shots of people trying to dig out from the wreckage. He also makes Tyler Owens a three-dimensional character instead of a cartoon on a tee shirt. In that regard, Chung is helped enormously by Glen Powell, who has the likable cockiness of a young Tom Cruise. The rest of Owens’s crew doesn’t have the star power of the cast in Twister, but his zany videographer (Brandon Perea) and drone pilot (Sasha Lane) provide much of the movie’s limited comic relief.

Twisters inherited a virtually foolproof formula from its predecessor, and it gets enough things right to make it enjoyable escapist entertainment, especially for those watching in special cinema formats like IMAX. Twin twisters and fire tornados are eye-openers. Glen Powell is almost as much a force of nature as the various storms. The basic storyline is a natural for a social media upgrade. However, the lack of a solid supporting cast or a signature set-piece moment is a disappointment. Still, Twisters packs a decent entertainment punch.