I don’t know if you can remember this, but apparently a couple of years ago a film was released which did not star Glen Powell. I know it’s hard to believe but Google it if you must – I swear it’s true. Of all the recent Hollywood nostalgic trips back to films of the 1980s and 90s, Twisters is one of the bigger surprises, because I didn’t realise that people actually had any real nostalgia for the first one. Still, I guess they must and audiences have been lapping up this latest instalment in the “rival groups of people chase tornadoes with unclear motivation” genre. Mark Mancina – and I’ll whisper this quietly because I know it’s generally loved – wrote the score for the first film and I could never quite understand the enthusiasm for it, but he’s not the flavour of the month these days and Benjamin Wallfisch is on hand instead. I have to admit that I’ve not loved his music nearly as much since he moved from the smaller-scale dramas with which he made his name into Hollywood blockbusters, but there’s no doubting his chops as a composer and while I’ve not really got the sense of his personal voice coming through these big popcorn scores yet, he’s very capable of providing entertainment value and that’s what he’s done for Twisters.

There are essentially three elements to the score, which Wallfisch dials up or down as appropriate – a country-rock influence for when the tornadoes die down and the characters entertain themselves with line dances and horse riding across the plains, a high-concept idea where the composer represents the tornadoes with musical figures literally swirling on the manuscript paper, and some big orchestral action music. While the first element provides entertainment (and the standalone offshoot Bernstein-ish western piece “She Told Us East” is great fun) and the second is the kind of going-the-extra-mile idea I think we can all appreciate – it’s the final element, the action music (some of which does contain that swirling material), where the score really shines. “This Car’s Gonna Fly” is a tremendous example of the form, and “Refinery” is another: by essentially taking at its core Remote Control-influenced stylings but allowing the orchestra to sound like an orchestra and, more importantly, conceiving it as orchestral music in the first place and not just getting an orchestrator to bulk up keyboard music, Wallfisch does this sort of thing on a much higher level than most of his contemporaries doing these popcorn movies (and, at the risk of losing 50% of my few remaining readers, he does it on a much higher level than Mancina did it in 1996). I do wish I could sense a bit more of him as a person in his music, but I can’t agree with those who have written this off as a generic modern action score – there’s more to it than that. The 55-minute album seems to pass by in no time (note how I resisted the temptation to say it passes breezily etc) and I think it’s a blast.

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