Review: Twister (1996)

Twister embodies so much of 1990s Hollywood filmmaking and movie culture. It was the second-highest grossing film of 1996 at the North American box office, and it was among the first 32 titles to be released on the new DVD format in 1997. There was even a ride, Twister…Ride It Out, at Universal Studios Florida. Although Twister’s success is notable for helping establish May as the start of the summer movie season—it premiered on May 10, 1996—I remember first seeing the movie later that summer during a matinee showing at a second-run movie theatre, and walking out into the sunshine after the darkness of the theatre and the storms on screen. Returning to Twister today, in the mid-2020s, around the release of the movie’s legacy sequel—the legacy sequel having become a regular feature of contemporary Hollywood and its interactions with 1990s blockbusters—we can see that Twister illustrates much of what has changed, improved, and been lost in the evolution of Hollywood blockbusters since 1996.

While the 1990s contain the roots of most of the big blockbuster genres of the 21st century, (so far), with animated smashes like The Lion King (1994) and superhero hits like Batman Forever (1995), the second half of the decade also marked the resurgence of disaster movies, after a period of popularity in the 1970s. Twister and, later in 1996, Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day, really stoked the late 90s appetite for disaster movies—although 1993’s Jurassic Park certainly operates within the genre. The films of Emmerich—not only ID4 but also 1998’s Godzilla (and, in the 2000s, The Day After Tomorrow and 2012)—represent the genre at its largest scale and its most excessive. In contrast, director Jan de Bont, who was coming off of the lean bomb-on-a-bus action movie, Speed (1994), shapes Twister into a more focused disaster movie. The tornadoes—whether the problems they cause or the solutions the protagonists aim for—never veer into science fiction territory. The action remains in the realm of the believable. Furthermore, the stakes are not the end of the world. Our interest is not for the safety of a country, a city, or even really a large community, but more so for a group of people, and maybe just a couple.

Twister follows a group of storm chasers and researchers over two days in tornado season in Oklahoma (note the compressions of time and place). With a screenplay by Michael Crichton and his then wife/writing partner, Anne-Marie Martin (and with rewrites by Joss Whedon and Steven Zaillian), the narrative combines a personal romance arc with the main public plot in classical Hollywood fashion, with both problems being resolved by the end of the film. Although, like many 90s disaster movies, the film contains an early scene with functionaries in a governmental department staring at big bulky computers and frowning at the worrying scenarios those computers are forecasting, the film ends with Bill Paxton’s Bill Harding kissing his no-longer-ex wife, Jo, played by Helen Hunt. A final helicopter shot pulls back from the couple, revealing their disinterest in their storm chaser friends around them as well as the path of destruction left by the F5 mega-tornado that has passed, as sunny skies prevail. This is not a spoiler because this is how every movie like this ends.

Such an ending doesn’t suggest, however, that the movie is more interested in its characters than its tornadoes. Make no mistake: Twister really only cares about tornadoes. In fact, the idea was initially pitched using an ILM preview of how the special effects might look, and the screenplay was later constructed around the high-concept premise of a tornado disaster. But Crichton and Martin recognize that an entertainment vehicle will run most efficiently with a familiar emotional plot at its centre. In addition to the rekindling of a marriage plot (à la His Girl Friday), the film plagues Helen Hunt’s Jo with the memory of the death of her father from a tornado when she was young. In another Hollywood standard, Jo’s personal trauma—shown to the audience in the first scene—becomes linked to the public problem—tornadoes striking without warning—that she is trying to solve. My brother Aren and I argued about the success of Jo’s subplot in our podcast discussion of 90s Summer Movies from a few years back. Whether you might think it’s effective or dumb, what it does regardless is fashion the present gathering storm into a monster rather than a natural phenomenon. Jo’s story personalizes a feature of the natural world to make it more menacing.

Essential to the effectiveness of these familiar character arcs are the actors chosen. Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton are good at coming across as fairly likeable regular people. We enjoy their bickering and sparring as we know it presages their eventual getting back together. (The idea that Bill’s new fiancée will just wander off as she sees him return to his one-time wife is another 90s standard, and one that Hollywood no longer cares for.) Jami Gertz plays Bill’s fiancée, Melissa, who he brings out to the field as he tries to get Jo to finally sign the divorce papers. Melissa is a therapist who is totally naive about tornadoes, and so she also functions as the audience surrogate, allowing characters to explain things about tornadoes to her. Lois Smith plays Jo’s Aunt Meg, a nice old lady in a country house who cooks steak and eggs for the storm chasers, but who also becomes another vehicle for audience emotions, when her small town is threatened by the storm. There is a definite functionality to aspects of the characters that does keep them from feeling totally organic, but it also helps to keep the focus on the storms.

None of the other characters are given any backstory, so we get to know them through mannerisms and characteristics. Fortunately, the supporting cast is pretty eccentric and a lot of fun. We get a scruffy ragtag group of storm chasers, with Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Dusty the best among them. There’s also Alan Ruck, Jeremy Davies, Scott Thomson, and the actor-director Todd Field, among others. They drive different vehicles representative of their characters, with Dusty driving an old van with the name “Barn Burner” painted on its front, equipped with a drinking tube he can access while he drives and giant external speakers to blast out classic rock.

Cary Elwes supplies another 90s favourite: the handsome, smug antagonist, always in contrast to the more regular, easygoing male lead. Elwes leads a team of competing researchers (staffed by Zach Grenier and Jake Busey, among others) equipped with matching black SUVs. Although they are visually designated the bad team, the plot doesn’t turn them into actual evil villains. This doesn’t mean they don’t meet a fate many viewers might find overdone, but it’s of a piece with the T-Rex tearing apart the lawyer in Jurassic Park. Smugness has it coming, I guess.

The special effects for Twister, while celebrated at the time, are very uneven when viewed today. The practical effects hold up well, but the CGI sometimes looks fake. An early shot of a satellite in the earth’s orbit is laughable. Sometimes the sky above a character doesn’t match closer shots of approaching storm clouds. Even though it seems that Jan de Bont, who came to directing through cinematography, and his special effects crew took great pains to try to deal with the sunny skies on some shooting days, the ability of VFX crews today to totally alter a background digitally would aid the overall effect of the film. In this respect, the easy fallback of complaining about CGI and praising practical effects misses the mark. The practical effects have aged better, but developments in CGI would improve other areas of Twister.

The action sequences remain intense, if a bit repetitive. There are essentially four main set pieces, and they all follow the Jurassic Park model of setting things up to build tension, sustaining the suspense, and then slowing things down only to repeat the build-up. But there’s more variety to the action sequences in Jurassic Park, from the slow-build to sheer terror of the T-Rex attack to the cat-and-mouse of the raptors. Unlike living dinosaurs, tornadoes are unthinking wind and clouds, and they cannot sneak up on people. You can see a tornado coming from a distance. De Bont uses changes in location as well as the sizes of the twisters to add some variety and surprises. One scene takes place in a ditch under a bridge, another in a vehicle, another at a drive-in and a garage at night, and finally on a farm. Some twisters are smaller, others moving and jumping around, while the final one is gigantic and inevitable. Overall, the action in Twister is not quite at the Spielbergian level of invention or spatial manipulation. De Bont is capable but not a master.

In retrospect, more than the special effects and the action, I appreciate the film’s atmosphere, the feelings it inspires. World-building is not exactly the same thing as creating atmosphere, and I find few modern blockbusters, even ones I enjoy, conjure atmosphere the way that some blockbusters of the 1990s do. Think of the first half of Jurassic Park, with the storm approaching the island. Think of the sense of anticipation and building pandemonium before the explosions in Independence Day (Aren has praised the first 45 minutes of that movie). Or, dare I say it, the rain soaked streets of New York City in the early parts of Emmerich’s Godzilla. Some of the most potent aspects of a work’s atmosphere are built on association, on the recalling of memories and the evoking of specific feelings. A film like James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) is wonderfully immersive, but that film is more about entering another world than invoking representations of reality we have experienced. Much of the appeal of Twister derives from the fact that it was shot on location in Oklahoma, and it shows. We can innately sense the time and place, and intuit the smell and feel of the wind, even if the stormy skies don’t always match.

So, while Twister is commonly labelled a theme park ride—and parts of it are, just like Jurassic Park—it is also a movie about the love of summer storms, in its storm chaser characters and in members of the audience. It’s about storm clouds in the distance. The calm and electricity of a late afternoon. Summer nights at the drive in. Corn fields and back roads. Racing around fast through the country in a truck. The heat. The smell of mud and weedy ditches. The feeling of a storm’s build, build, crash, and then the clouds dispersing. Formally, the film is not lyrical, but it’s evocative, built up of smart representations of key memory items, such as wind chimes rustling or the lore people share about tornadoes and big storms (“Remember that big one that hit in…”). The compressed time and rooted place helps build the atmosphere of Twister.

But Twister is also a movie, and it knows that it is. This is another subtle feature of the 90s blockbuster. Jurassic Park famously reveals its artificial nature through the self-referential placement of products featuring its own movie logo. Twister contains movie allusions that remind us of the artificiality of this representation of natural phenomena. The film opens with a twister coming, and we can’t help but think of another girl on a farm and her little dog fearing a coming tornado. I’m talking about Dorothy and Toto, of course. The references in Twister to The Wizard of Oz (1939) are made explicit with the devices the researchers are trying to get the tornadoes to suck up, made up of hundreds of little sensors, named Dorothy I, II, III, and IV.

And then there’s the way that The Shining plays on the movie screen when the twister breaks into the drive-in and the screen is lifted up into the sky, while Jack Nicholson is trying to break down the door. That moment links the natural terror of a tornado to the history of cinematic horror and suspense. This is one final way that Twister shows a measure of sophistication and art amid its compelling mechanics of suspense.

Twister may not be a top-tier blockbuster, but it’s worth remembering its place in cinema history. It had a big impact in its day, and it can still conjure exquisite feelings today.

7 out of 10

Twister (1996, USA)

Directed by Jan de Bont; written by Michael Crichton and Anne-Marie Martin; starring Helen Hunt, Bill Paxton, Jami Gertz, Lois Smith, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Alan Ruck, Jeremy Davies, Scott Thomson, Todd Field, Zach Grenier, Jake Busey, and Cary Elwes.

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