Tornado Fails History and Genre

Coming right on the heels of Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme, in which a businessman from another era reveals an intuitive leadership goal — “Slaves paid. Famine finished. Beat bureaucrats.” — Tornado presents a bizarrely savage view of human history.

Scottish director-writer John Maclean flips George Santayana’s famous saying, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The revisionist action-movie Tornado is set in the British Isles in 1790 but subjects that period to progressive politics and historical shame. Tornado is a bewildered Japanese girl (played by pop singer Kôki) who fights off a horde of white men, thieving gold vagabonds who represent both Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Celtic ancestry.

Maclean romanticizes the heritage of these European and Oriental barbarians so that native masculine brutes threaten a displaced female foreigner. In keeping with contemporary political fashion, Maclean gives advantage to the latter rather than acknowledging shared human flaws.

Tornado plays out like a combination Western and vengeful horror movie in which the besieged heroine dispatches her enemies in a series of grotesque killings stylized with slow-moving deliberation. This is largely an art thing. The spare but spectral landscapes recall Julie Taymor’s Shakespearean adaptation Titus as well as the supernal opening that Vilmos Zsigmond photographed for Scarecrow, Jerry Schatzberg’s 1970s exploration of American anomie. Maclean and cinematographer Robbie Ryan take on the revenge-thriller genre to address Western hostility from Europe during the Middle Ages and implicitly down to the present.

Maclean’s central metaphor borrows from Jidaigeki, the Japanese genre typically known from samurai movies, usually set before the 19th century — pre-Westernized and pre-industrialized Japan as shown when Tornado and her father Fujin (Takehiro Hira) travel the wintry hinterlands performing a puppet show, Sign of Fuji, the Samurai. This violent legend (”You murdered my wife for no reason at all,” one puppet says prior to beheading another) is the source of Fujin teaching self-defense sword tactics to Tornado. “Move with precision,” Fujin warns. “The audience is not blind.” Thus Maclean’s narrative follows a fatalist structure.

But Tornado isn’t simply classical. Its unlikely mix of cultures seems anachronistic, even laughable at times. Sulky Tornado tells her father, “I’m bored.” But she quickly realizes she must hide the white men’s gold stash, leaving their leader Sugarman (Tim Roth), his psychotic son Little Sugar (Jack Lowden), and others to eventually fight among themselves. The thugs oppose other whites (plus one exotic token black thug) also struggling toward civilization, opposing women through gender domination. (Joanne Whalley plays matronly Vienna, who advises Tornado, “You are your mother’s daughter and your father’s.”)

Throughout hunt, chase and combat, Maclean and Ryan feature wide shots of enemies trudging across lakes and coves that suggest tribal movement across continents. It’s an apocalyptic fable set in the European wasteland for which Jed Kurzel composes spikey, chiming effects that recall the superb, almost musique concrète score he composed for Justin Kurzel’s Macbeth.

Despite Maclean’s conceptual folly, it’s apparent that Tornado also attempts to say something profound about the clash of global opposites. Instead of Santayana, Maclean goes film-school and poetic, quoting Arseni Tarkovsky:

I would readily pay with my life
For a safe place with constant warmth
Were it not that life’s flying needle
|Leads me on through the world like a thread.

Tarkovsky père isn’t Tarkovsky fils, and Tornado isn’t serious or intelligent enough. As critic John Demetry suggested about the use of history in The Phoenician Scheme, Anderson has learned from the past and lights upon a movingly instructive, virtually Trumpian agenda for civilization. But Maclean leans so heavily on genre formula that he trivializes mankind’s fortune. Bratty Tornado warns, “For those who wish to survive in battle, there is only death. I am Tornado, remember my name.” It’s too trashy to give history or providence its due.