The original Twister may not be a great movie, but the years have made it look better and better for the same reasons a vintage Gap jacket feels like designer gear. Now that stores only sell clothes that have been slapped together from plastic sheeting and surgical staples in fast-fashion gulags, what used to be considered basic construction — stuff like finished seams and sturdy material — becomes downright luxurious in comparison. By the standards of 2020s content slop, so many of the elements that made Jan de Bont’s 1996 movie a meat-and-potatoes blockbuster now seem borderline artisanal, and I’m not just talking about the practical effects, which involved enormous wind machines and tractors being dropped from helicopters, and which have held up remarkably well.

It’s the more granular details that stand out, like the now-unfashionable clarity of the lighting, all the better to appreciate the faces of the glorious array of character actors — among them Alan Ruck, Jeremy Davies, Tár director Todd Field, and a 28-year-old Philip Seymour Hoffman — who play storm-chasing grad students. Hell, all the better to appreciate the faces of the leads, Bill Paxton with his huge honking forehead and Helen Hunt with her girl-next-door earthiness, two actors whose sexiness was only enhanced by having real-world texture. Twister was a divorce comedy tucked inside a disaster flick, an idiot His Girl Friday about two workaholics bickering their way back together over the course of a day spent trying to get a bucket of tennis-ball-size sensors sucked up into a tornado. It was incredibly silly down to Hunt delivering a line implying a twister had hunted down her family, but it was also grown-up in an easy way that feels like a novelty now, with characters who’d racked up some living.

Twister isn’t some sacred (flying) cow, is what I’m saying, and Twisters isn’t some travesty defiling a classic. The not-quite-three-decades-in-coming sequel instead underwhelms in a more poignant way by suggesting we really have forgotten how to work in the mode of the original. It’s an attempt to make a big, dumb entertainment that keeps getting in its own way, unable to stop itself from being serious about things that in no way need to be taken seriously. It’s not a throwback, but it doesn’t feel like an imaginative update on the original, either. If Twister is the thrifted mall find, Twisters is the sweatshirt made by the DTC brand that touts its use of century-old manufacturing processes on Instagram with a fit that is universally unflattering.

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