If you’ve read Shea’s roundup of Dune: Part Two in every format, you might have gathered that we’re not the biggest proponents of the more gimmicky formats offered by theatres these days over here at Screen Love Affair. Personally, I find most of them to be unnecessary and distracting. I actively dislike gimmicks like 3D, no matter how hard James Cameron tries to sell me on it, and DBox, which I found mildly amusing but highly distracting. These gimmicks tend to have the opposite of their intended effect and break my immersion, rather than add to it. A good movie, I believe, doesn’t need any extra effects to be transportive and fun. It just needs to tell a compelling story.
I’ll admit, the first and only time I’ve seen a movie in 4DX was when we saw Dune Two. The novelty of the experience was fun at first, but it quickly wore out its welcome and made me wish I had just gone to see the movie in IMAX again. It was amusing, and I didn’t regret trying it out, but I didn’t feel the need to ever try it again. Ultimately, it was just too distracting for me to really justify the cost of admission (especially when the theatre-going experience today is already so expensive, among other things).
But Lee Isaac Chung’s Twisters (2024) may have converted me. 4DX is the most maximalist of movie gimmicks. Here, have a little bit of everything, it says, practically turning a trip to the movie theatre into an amusement park ride. Twisters, however, is the perfect 4DX movie—it feels almost as if the 4DX experience was invented for it.
I realize now how mismatched Dune: Part Two was to what 4DX promises. Yes, there’s action in Dune, but most of the 4DX tricks felt superfluous to it and didn’t add anything except an amusing distraction from what was happening on screen.
But with Twisters, the 4DX effects felt perfectly suited to what was happening on screen. Every time the wind machines picked up or I felt droplets of mist on my face, while faced with the gusts of wind and rain unfolding on the screen, it felt as if the fourth wall was breaking, and I could pretend just a little bit that I was in the movie. While the strobe lights were one of my least favourite effects during Dune—flashing during sequences of artillery fire in a way that felt out of place and irritating—here, the strobes were used sparingly but to fantastic effect, flashing in time with the occasional lightning strike on screen to make me feel as if I was watching a real, live thunderstorm. The fact that there was a real, live thunderstorm happening outside the Cineplex at the time of my screening (and, in fact, a tornado touched down in nearby Perth, ON that same night) was just icing on the immersive experience cake.
The opening sequence of Twisters is a particularly fun, and surprisingly brutal, way to throw us right into the action. As the devastating EF 5 tornado built up, and the storm grew more intense, and the 4DX chairs started to move and rumble, and the wind machines picked up, and drops of water started hitting my face, I couldn’t help but feel giddy. I had already seen Twisters in IMAX before seeing it in 4DX, and I felt pretty giddy then too, but mostly due to the thrill of having a fun time at the movies with a whole bunch of my friends. But at 4DX, it was the same sort of giddiness you might feel on the upward slope of a rollercoaster.
When the action in that opening sequence builds up to its most intense moment, holding on Daisy Edgar Jones’s Kate as the storm gusts around her, sound building to the point of being almost unbearable, and then the wave of tension finally breaks and the sound cuts out—and all of the 4DX hustle and bustle stops with it—the entire theatre let out a collective chuckle of nervous laughter and relief. That has got to be one of my favourite movie theatre moments so far this year, because it reminded me of why I love going to the movies in the first place, of how, throughout the whole history of cinema, going to the theatre was always a communal experience. In that moment, we were all feeling the same thing at the same time. The joy and excitement at what we were collectively getting into was palpable, and I felt a little more connected to everyone in the room because of it.
It sounds a little silly to say I had a profound moment of shared humanity during a big, dumb blockbuster disaster movie about people trying to tame tornadoes. But Twisters is also deceptively deep. Chung’s feature debut, Minari, was a beautifully small-scale story about a family of immigrants trying to make the American Dream a reality. Twisters, on the other hand, is big in every sense of the word, but it, too, is concerned with the ways that people come together and help one another survive. The answer lies in collective action and care. We have to take care of each other, and the only way to tame a tornado is together—with a rag-tag group of storm chasers, led by Glen Powell.
I keep coming back to a sequence around the middle of the movie, in which Glen Powell’s Tyler Owens and Daisy Edgar Jones’s Kate Carter are intercut, explaining the science and mystery of tornadoes—how we don’t actually know precisely what makes them form. There’s an element of unknowability and unpredictability in these major natural phenomena that have the power to both shape and destroy our world as we know it. We can’t really know what goes on inside a tornado, and yet we keep trying to figure it out anyway. Maybe it’s cheesy, but I find that kind of beautiful.
What I’m really trying to get at here is that this particular movie in this particular format feels like the formation of a tornado—all of the elements aligning just perfectly to create something unexpectedly effective.
Of course, not everything in the 4DX experience felt quite that effective. The smoke machines, for instance, still felt anticlimactic and distracting. And the intense thrashing of the seats did start to wear out its welcome after 2+ hours. The few times they activated the smell-o-vision, I wondered why they bothered. But overall, this felt like the perfect marriage of form and content. I had a blast, but honestly, I think a lot of that just has to do with Twisters itself, which is the kind of movie that 4DX was made for. It’s not saying or doing anything particularly profound or novel, but it feels like a true summer blockbuster from a bygone era, perfectly crafted to make you consume ungodly amounts of popcorn. For the most part, 4DX really did add to my immersion in the story, which is saying something considering how much I usually dislike these sorts of movie gimmicks.
I had fun, and that’s all that really matters. But given the choice to see this, or any other movie, in IMAX or in 4DX, I would still choose IMAX every time.
Shea Angus
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