The Twisters reboot has no right being this good

Here’s a question any discerning film lover might have: wait, why is Lee Isaac Chung, the sensitive director of arthouse favourite and Oscar-winning drama Minari (2020), suddenly making a multiplex flick like Twisters, the new next-gen reboot of the 1996 disaster epic that gave us a flying cow?

When he landed the gig, Anthony Ramos – who plays storm chaser Javi in the film – had the same thought. “Yo, I asked him that,” Ramos says with a laugh over the phone from his home in New York. “‘Why did you choose this film? How did this happen?’ And he’s like, ‘Bro, I went through this stuff.’ And he really did.”

Look to the details and it makes perfect sense. As depicted in Minari – an autobiographical film about his Korean parents’ attempts to establish a life for their family in rural America – Chung grew up on a farm in Lincoln, Arkansas, just 12 kilometres east of the Oklahoma border, a state that bears the brunt of the US’s infamous Tornado Alley.

Under Chung’s deft hand, Twisters is mesmerising. It has no right to be this good. It plays as if Michael Cimino had the chance to make a rollicking geo-disaster film but with a ’90s child’s enthusiasm for popcorn cinema. With its sweeping country vistas and warm-hearted excursions into rural traditions, it’s as much a love letter to small-town life and homespun values as it is a big-budget ($US200 million, reportedly) blockbuster about killer tornadoes and the weirdos that chase them.

“Doing a movie like this, it has sentimental value to him,” Ramos says of Chung. “He brought something to this movie that was so real, having experienced this stuff in real life. That possibility of a tornado hitting at any moment, he knew that feeling growing up.”

Beyond the franchise’s enduring relevance – in this era of climate change, the unfettered rush of AI and ever-increasing qualms about Silicon Valley’s ethos of “move fast and break things”, the original Twister’s post-Jurassic Park anxieties about corporate greed sullying scientific progress seems particularly resonant – much of Twisters′ success lies in its convincing performances, led by Daisy Edgar-Jones’ idealistic meteorologist Kate; Glen Powell as smarmy YouTuber Tyler Owens; and Ramos’ morally conflicted Javi.

Following his lead turn in last year’s Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, Ramos – whose major break came in 2015 during Lin-Manuel Miranda’s original Broadway run of Hamilton, where he played the dual roles of John Laurens and Philip Hamilton – is becoming an old hand at such epic, big-budget productions. “I just love movies, man – and I love doing big movies,” he says.

“I love the whole process of VFX, of using your imagination to see something that’s not there or to conjure up a feeling about a thing that you can’t actually see, like twisters or transformers. It’s so much fun and it’s a different kind of way to work.”

At 32, Ramos is as Noo Yawk as a scallion spread schmear on a Yankees hat, not too far removed from the charming Brooklyn motormouth he played in the Netflix series of Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It, the TV role that initially served as his screen breakthrough. Just before our interview, he’d had a reminder of how far he’d come after meeting with his old Shakespeare teacher, “Miss H”, from AMDA, the American Musical and Dramatic Academy, the performing arts college on New York’s Upper West Side he once attended. Was he getting some acting advice?

“Nah, man, she don’t really give acting advice,” Ramos says. “She’s more like, ‘Bro, make sure you don’t treat people poorly and don’t be a piece of shit human,’ and I’m like, ‘Alright, Miss H, no problem!’”

More than his gig in a blockbuster like Twisters, Miss H was more impressed that, three weeks ago, Ramos finally completed his bachelor’s degree, 11 years after he’d dropped out to pursue professional work midway into his third year of college. “I’m like, ‘Yo, I just told you a bunch of cool shit I’m working on but you’re proud ’cause I got my bachelor’s degree?!’” Ramos says incredulously. “And she was like, ‘Yeah, I just feel your education, no one can take that away from you.’

“And I get it,” Ramos continues. “I spoke at the graduation and I got emotional because I’m the first person from my immediate family to get a degree. It was a really good moment for me.”

Before performing was a thought, Ramos had been set to play NCAA Division III baseball in college; the plan got waylaid by an oversight when he missed the deadline to file a financial aid form and all his school applications were withdrawn. “I was like, ‘Damn! Shit! I don’t know what I’m gonna do,’” Ramos recalls. “My family, we were having a hard time at the time, too, and now we missed that deadline and I had no school to go to.”

Another teacher at his high school urged Ramos to audition for AMDA and arranged a meeting for him with the Jerry Seinfeld Scholarship Foundation, set up by the famed comedian to assist New York City high school students with up to $US10,000 worth of tuition a year. “So I met up with them and, basically, I told them my whole life story,” Ramos says.

“I was like, ‘Look, this is how I grew up, in the projects, single-parent home, been through all types of craziness: violence, drugs, alcohol, just bugged-out stuff. My grades, they’re not a real reflection of who I am. I just need somebody to give me a chance.’” A couple of days later, with the school’s acceptance cut-off looming, Seinfeld’s people called him saying they’d pay for his schooling for all four years. “It was all a blessing, man. It was beautiful.”

Just over a decade on, versatility is the driving force behind Ramos’ career. With Twisters done, he’s planning a return to the stage to play Mozart in a new production of Amadeus, his first stage role since a brief turn in 2018 playing the lead Usnavi in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights (a role he later took to the big screen, earning a Golden Globe nomination).

“He was flamboyant and daring, and it’s gonna be cool to be able to dive into Mozart and start to explore that guy,” he says. “I’m just trying to do roles that I haven’t done. With every movie or anything I do, I just want people to say, ‘Wow, I haven’t seen him do that.’”

That’s sure to be the case with another pie he has his finger in – bringing kids’ cartoon Bob the Builder to the big screen with a “new personality and identity and point of view”. “We’re setting the movie in Puerto Rico, using Puerto Rico as a landscape and having that culture be a real part of this movie,” Ramos explains.

“Puerto Rico is full of people who’ve built things their whole lives, built communities and had to rebuild after tragedy; it just felt like what better place to do Bob the Builder than a place like that where people have been rebuilding for years?”

Twisters, Mozart, Bob the Builder – you’d be hard-pressed to find a more enjoyably bonkers trajectory among Hollywood’s new crop. “Look, I just love my job, bro!” Ramos laughs. “I feel grateful that I get to do this. It’s a blessing and it’s fun and it’s just cool to be able to flex and try new things. So that’s what I’m gonna do.”

Twisters is out in cinemas on Thursday.

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