Somejack - Jack Of Some Trades

it’s a spy’s g o o d b y e.

Twister (1996) Reboot Part 2 - a new villain

Do we need a new villain?

No! We don’t! Shockingly enough, this movie predicted with wild accuracy a current theme in analytical meteorology, which is the pervasive reach of privatization. Private firms like AccuWeather currently have the capacity to provide subscription-based weather alerts for private individuals and companies that pay for the service; whereas the National Weather Service is floundering under a lack of funding. John Oliver did a really good summary of the issue here, but I 100% reading further into it.

So we can keep the villain as a meteorologist-driven-by-capitalistic-desire-rather-than-altruism and keep the story relevant and compelling. Jonas as Twister’s villain has only a thin connection to the heroes as an acquaintance from college. We can go in two directions from this: make a broader story by creating a villain closer to AccuWeather, or make a more personal story by making a villain -even an explicit antagonist- with a better defined relationship to the heroes.

More on my take on a Twister reboot villain below the cut

For my reboot, I would want a more personal story. One of the greatest disaster movies of all time, the Norwegian Bølgen, focuses only one one family and the people they tangentially interact with during the eponymous disaster wave. This setup makes for a very compelling story with memorable characters. Keeping the scope of the narrative small (reminder that Twister takes place over the course of a single day and is never more than a half an hour from Wakita) is always good if you want your movie to float like a butterfly in terms of pacing, and sting like a bee in terms of action.

For the sake of a little zest in what would otherwise be a potentially repetitive narrative, lets make the villain an active antagonist who opposes the main group. Under the guise of chasing the same storm system, this villain was sent as a saboteur to stop the heroes from collecting the necessary data. They set up roadblocks that force the heroes to take detours that may or may not be trespassing, then call the police when they trespass.

What’s their motivation? Is it pure greed-driven malice and desire to be better than their counterparts? That worked well for the original Twister, but I never felt satisfied with Jonas as a character. I felt he was important to the narrative, but his decision making was inconsistent and he didn’t deserve the end he got. Let’s make our villain something just a little more complicated. Went to the same school as one of the ensemble protagonists (not the main protagonist) but didn’t get the same financial aid. Whereas the protagonist they know could get on with their life and do what they want, the villain needed to take the highest paying job to start taking care of loans, and that brought them here.

If I wanted to make a very entertaining villain, I would make them a good person who could have been one of the heroes in another life, had college tuition not forced their hand. Show them concocting schemes to derail the protagonists in the same scene that they help people who were struck by an earlier tornado.

In the end they just get beat. They’re outmaneuvered by the heroes, or maybe in all of their scheming they failed to realize they drove directly into the path of a tornado and end up being thrown out of the movie. The only good part of Jonas in the original movie is that he didn’t take up a lot of time, whereas in this theoretical reboot more dedication would be needed to properly develop then remove a sympathetic villain-by-circumstance.

tl;dr - the real villain is America’s crippling student loan debt and privatization problems.

We make it all this way, so far out into the darkness…why couldn’t we have brought more light? THE EXPANSE • 1.01 ’Dulcinea’

Conservatives accidentally doing this never gets old