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The most special of the many special effects in "Twisters" isn't what you'd expect. It's not the howling winds, the towering thunder spouts, the hollering woman getting yanked up into a stormy sky by a bunch of bad weather. No, the biggest kick in this movie is the easy chemistry between its two stars -- the smiley and inordinately likable Glen Powell ("Anyone but You" and "Hit Man") and the gently radiant Daisy Edgar-Jones ("Normal People"). The teaming of these two in a big-budget action-romcom is a meet-cute of sizeable proportions.

The movie is being promoted as a "standalone sequel" to the 1996 disaster hit "Twister," which starred Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton. You may call it a remake if you wish. It's all very up-to-date, of course. There's a team of high-tech tornado chasers who get storm-stomped at the outset, leaving only two of their number -- meteorologists Kate Cooper (Edgar-Jones) and her quasi-boyfriend/associate Javier (Anthony Ramos, of "In the Heights") -- to get back together again five years later, when Javi has obtained some sketchy financing for a next-level weather project and Kate reluctantly comes aboard.

The story quickly relocates to Oklahoma, a state that, if the movie is to be believed, is populated almost entirely by tornadoes. Out on the dusty plains in their gadget-packed vans, Kate and Javi and the rest of his team soon encounter Tyler Owens (Powell), a "cowboy scientist" and YouTube star for whom tornado-wrangling, as he calls it, is mainly a blast (he has built-in fireworks launchers on his team's vehicles), and a profitable one, too (he has his own line of tornado merch). Tyler immediately starts getting up Kate's nose, suggesting that she tag along with him and bask in his social-media stardom. ("If you can keep up, we may put you in the episode," he says.)

Kate is majorly put off by this guy, at first -- but we know that can't last. And while she initially sees Tyler as a goofball greed-head milking the tornado game for money and fame, we can just feel there's more to him than that. We also begin to wonder if Kate should maybe look a little more closely into the source of the money that's financing her pal Javi's pricey twister expeditions.

The movie's unlikely director, Lee Isaac Chung (whose last film was the heavily Oscar-nominated and much lower-key immigrant drama "Minari"), navigates the movie's blockbuster tropes with witty intelligence. (In a scene echoing one from the original film, we see a small-town theater that's holding a monster-movie festival being torn apart by a tornado just as the "It's alive!" lab scene in the 1931 "Frankenstein" begins unspooling.) Chung provides lashings of traditional science-babble (there's occasional mention of things like "vertical wind shear"), but he doesn't do it to death. And when talk very briefly turns toward a "once-in-a-generation" tornado onslaught that's supposedly on the way, he declines to follow it with a climate-crisis sermonette. Not when we've already gotten Owens' take on new-age meteorology: "It's part science, part religion," he says.

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To find out more about Kurt Loder and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.

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