Twisted‘ Kate shares many similarities with Helen Hunt’s Jo, however, the characters are opposites in an important way. Lee Isaac Chung’s disaster film continues the 1996 classic and still features some of the original’s greatest achievements. Reviews for Twisters praise its engaging story, well-developed and charming characters, and great action sequences – making the sequel feel like a standalone film that nevertheless honors the core of its predecessor.
Leading the Twisted With a cast of characters like Kate, Daisy Edgar-Jones offers a heroine as compelling as Helen Hunt’s charismatic and spontaneous storm chaser. Kate and Jo share a relentless, almost childlike passion for chasing storms, not to mention their desire to save lives is influenced by their haunted pasts. Like Jo, Kate’s losses take her straight into the eye of the storm in Twisted end. For these reasons, it’s easy to consider them the same character. Although they experience some of the same defining events, Edgar-Jones and Hunt’s characters approach danger and deal with pain in opposite ways.
Twisters gives Kate a similar origin story to Jo Harding
Kate and Jo lost loved ones to tornadoes
Notably, Twisted uses some of the main plot points from the first installment: a tragic loss, a new and exciting return to hunting, and romance. Kate and Jo’s past tragedies, in particular, serve as important devices that drive the narrative forward and provide the characters with rich internal conflict. Consequently, their romantic interests come to play a pivotal role in helping the female protagonists overcome their losses. Figuratively and literally, taming the tornado, Kate and Jo thematically reverse the disastrous circumstances that took their loved ones.
In TwistedIn the opening sequence, young Jo is taken to an underground refugee by her father and mother. Unfortunately, her father dies after being sucked into a tornado while Jo and her mother get to safety. Likewise, at the beginning of TwistedKate is a confident and ambitious PhD student who is experimenting with her friends to try and lower the humidity inside a tornado to make it collapse. In an unexpected twist, the chosen tornado becomes an EF5, taking the lives of three of Kate’s best friends, one of whom is her boyfriend.
Kate makes the opposite career decision to Jo after surviving a tornado
Kate avoids tornadoes while Jo runs headlong into them
Although Kate and Jo lose important people to the tornadoes, the tragedy affects them in opposite ways. While Jo becomes dangerously obsessed with tornadoes, Kate wishes she would never face them again. As an adult, Helen Hunt Twisted The character is introduced as a ruthless and passionate storm chaser who wants to study the inside of a tornado in hopes of designing a better warning system. Five years after the deaths of her friends, Daisy Edgar-Jones’ character has dropped out of school and works in an office in New York, a city moderately safe from tornadoes.
The 2024 film is much more interested in Kate returning to her calling as it saves many people’s lives.
As the protagonists deal with loss in unique ways, Twisted and its sequel present different healing journeys. While Jo needs to learn to let go and stop putting herself in danger, Kate needs to tame her fear and regain belief in her purpose. Notably, Twisted focuses mainly on the second-chance romance between its protagonists, with Jo’s wounds being what separated the couple in the first place. Isaac Chung puts romance in second place, cutting even the Twisted‘kiss scene. The 2024 film is much more interested in Kate returning to her calling as it saves many people’s lives.
Kate and Jo’s unique approach to trauma makes sense considering the specifics of the events. While one was just a little girl when her father died, the other was an adult. It’s been longer since Jo lost her father, which could explain why her grief doesn’t feel heavy, but rather settled into her extreme personality. Unlike Hunt’s character, Kate has reason to feel guilty about the recent incident. All over TwistedEdgar-Jones’ character seeks to redeem herself, when in reality she must forgive herself – while Jo comes to accept that there are some things she cannot control or explain.