In 1996, Jan de Bont’s tornado-chasing adventure Twister revived the disaster movie by using computer-generated imagery (CGI), at the time a relatively new technology. Now, in the belated follow-up – strictly neither a sequel nor a remake – the tornadoes have become more deadly and more frequent. But Twisters shows another perilous phenomenon: the trend for promising directors of independent films to be swept up in the whirlwind of a blockbuster.

The director here is Lee Isaac Chung, who had a much-acclaimed breakthrough with his autobiographical 2020 drama Minari, about a Korean family settling in rural Arkansas. Given that this was a highly intimate and subtle film, it’s odd to see him working on such an impersonally monumental production as Twisters.

There isn’t a great deal of the Minari Chung in Twisters – scripted by Mark L Smith from a story by Joseph Kosinski – despite touches of spiky warmth in the badinage between its leads, Daisy Edgar-Jones, Glen Powell and Anthony Ramos. Edgar-Jones, who starred in the BBC’s Normal People, plays Kate, a meteo­rologist with an instinctive talent for divining where tornadoes will appear. At one point, the camera wheels around her as she seeks clues in the drifting seeds of a dandelion. Twisters begins in Oklahoma with an extended bravura sequence and the film’s best-paced build-up: Kate and her team, including slackerish Javi (played by baby-faced Ramos) head out on an experimental mission to tame tornadoes, armed with a wagonload of coils and barrels of chemicals – a proper Ghostbusters arsenal. But things go tragically wrong.

Five years on, a traumatised Kate has retreated to a desk job in New York. But Javi lures her back to Oklahoma to help with his own tornado project. All the hard data in the world cannot track a twister like Kate can, with her preternatural nose for moisture. The pair have rivals, a social-media savvy, down-home bunch that someone describes as ‘hillbillies with a YouTube channel’. This piratical crew is led by Tyler Owens (Powell), who bills himself as a ‘tornado wrangler’. The cowboy analogy comes to a head when the twisters hit an actual rodeo, prompting him to declare that tornadoes and bulls are the same: ‘You don’t face your foes – you ride ’em.’

The big tornado in Twister was called the ‘Finger of God’ and was the film’s undisputed star (the ostensible leads, Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton, were really its supporting cast). In the less transcendentally inflected Twisters, the special effects are still laid on with the most generous of trowels, but the film also relies on a palpable dose of the real – a tonic for audiences jaded by CGI’s weightless immateriality. Apocalyptic awe is tempered by the human factor – joshing between the characters and the awareness that tornadoes have devastating effects on real people. Filming took place during the actual storm season in Oklahoma, part of the North American corridor known as Tornado Alley. Cinematographer Dan Mindel shot Twisters on 35mm film, making the clouds seem tactile, heavy with grit.

Twisters has one strong connection to cinema tradition: a simmering romance between the rough-diamond dude and the classy dame. Powell and Edgar-Jones enact an adventure movie dynamic going back to Cary Grant and Jean Arthur in Only Angels Have Wings and Bogart and Hepburn in The African Queen. This being a 21st-century film, however, Kate is not only as accomplished an expert as Tyler but every bit as kick-ass too: a key scene involves her rescuing him from a collapsing water tower.

Tyler and Kate may have different styles, but they have more in common than they realise: he’s not, as at first appears, just a yee-hawing blowhard but a trained meteorologist too; the scientist lady he teasingly calls ‘city girl’ is at heart a country girl getting back to her roots and her bred-in-the-bone understanding of wild weather.

By contrast, noble-intentioned but naive Javi represents the dangers of exploitation. He runs a lavishly funded tornado-­busting project, but it turns out that his financial backer is out to profit from regular folk. Twisters, with a budget estimated at $200 million, is that enduring Hollywood paradox: the blockbuster that uses capitalism as shorthand for moral corruption. We know from the start that Javi’s business is compromised just by seeing its natty corporate graphics. (It would be interesting to know the cost of the logoed Twisters T-shirts worn by the ushers at the London premiere.)

The film contains one nice trick for cinephiles. In a small-town cinema which briefly serves as a storm shelter, the film being projected is the 1931 Frankenstein, in which Colin Clive’s Promethean scientist attempts to domesticate the raging elements. Eventually, the cinema’s back wall and screen are ripped away, revealing the tempest outside – prompting us to forget movie spectacle for a moment and attend to the real. Indeed, throughout, we’re reminded that the true mission of Kate and co is not adventure but to protect people from messed-up nature (climate change is the subtext) and to help them when things get rough. The most memorable imagery in Twisters does not involve chaos and fury but the aftermath of tornado strikes – whole towns flattened to sprawling fields of debris, one of them inscribed with a zigzag, as if the tornado has carved its signature there, Zorro-style.

The lead actors are personable, but they are never allowed to be charismatic enough to overpower the action. Powell – so entertaining as the goofy, protean hero of Richard Linklater’s Hit Man – here registers as a disposably genial daredevil, a gee-shucks swashbuckler. Edgar-Jones is mainly called on to play at being earnest, remorseful and eager; we don’t get a sense of what she might become as a big-screen actor.

As for the action, it proceeds at a dizzying clip. People, cars and buildings are hurled aloft, always faster than we can register. The only image that we’re allowed to stop and look at, just occasionally, is of Edgar-Jones and Powell anxiously gazing at something in the distance. Given how little acting they get to do here, they may be worried that the shadow looming on the horizon is a sequel.