Movie Review – Twister (1996)

When it comes to Hollywood making movies about meteorological events, whether it’s large or small scale, it’s often hard to find that right blend of real science and movie magic.

Sometimes you just need to shut off your brain, sit back, and enjoy a Hollywood blockbuster movie.

This is the case with 1996′s hit movie thrill ride, Twister.

Directed by Jan de Bont, Twister stars Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt as Bill Harding and Dr. Jo Harding, two storm chasers in the process of getting a divorce while trying to implement their new data-gathering weather instruments in the path of a tornado.  The technology will allow them to accurately record the wind speeds and other aspects of the tornadoes, giving scientists better data to study and make more accurate warning systems.  The problem, however, is that the data-gathering instrument, nicknamed Dorothy, has to be placed directly in the path of an oncoming tornado.

Cary Elwes plays the role of Dr. Jonas Miller, a rival storm chaser out to make money instead of pursuing the storms for the science.  Jami Gerz has the role of Dr. Melissa Reeves, Bill’s new fiancée who happens to work as a reproductive therapist.  Some of the fellow storm chasers are played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, Alan Ruck and Jeremy Davies.

Twister (1996) – (c) Warner Bros.

Twister begins in June of 1969 out in the Great Plains.  An ordinary night at Jo’s parent’s farmhouse turns into a disaster as an F5 tornado (the strongest class of tornado on the Fujita scale) bears down on their home.  Young Jo and her parents rush outside to the underground storm shelter.  The powerful tornado arrives and Jo’s father tries to hold the door closed to protect the family.  The tornado’s winds rip off the door and carry away Jo’s father, killing him.

Twister (1996) – (c) Warner Bros.

Fast forward to today (remember that we’re back in 1996).

It’s early in the day and data from a weather satellite is showing the possibility of a tornado outbreak throughout Oklahoma.  Bill Harding (Bill Paxton) is driving with his fiancée, Dr. Melissa Reeves (Jami Gerz) out to meet Jo (Helen Hunt) to have her finish signing the divorce papers.  Jo is out in the field with her storm chasing team, preparing equipment for a day of chasing tornadoes.

Bill and Melissa arrive at the site and the storm chasers, especially Dustin ‘Dusty’ Davis (Philip Seymour Hoffman), give Bill a hearty welcome.  Bill hasn’t been around any of them since taking a job as a broadcast meteorologist for a local television station.  He introduces Melissa to Dusty and then heads off to find Jo.  Jo is pleased to see Bill, but she keeps stalling when he tries to have her sign the divorce papers.

Twister (1996) – (c) Warner Bros.

Jo shows Bill their new data-gathering instrument that Bill helped design back in the storm lab.  He’s pleasantly surprised to see a working version of DOROTHY in person.  The team assembled four of the DOROTHY units and hopes to place them in the path of a tornado today.  Bill and Jo show Melissa DOROTHY and explain how it works and what they hope to accomplish.

Suddenly there’s breaking news.  The weather is changing and tornadoes could begin forming at any moment not too far from their location.  The team jumps into their vehicles and takes off down the road.  Jo didn’t sign the papers, so Bill and Melissa hop into their pickup truck and follow the storm chasers down the road.

Twister (1996) – (c) Warner Bros.

While driving, a rival team of storm chasers passes the team and nearly runs Bill off the road.  He sees that the leader is Dr. Jonas Miller (Carey Elwes), an “evil” storm chaser who got himself some sponsors and is out in the field solely for the fame and money.  Everybody stops at the same rest area and Bill sees that Jonas as some field equipment that looks extremely similar to his DOROTHY.  The two men scuffle for a moment before they’re separated.  Jonas mocks Bill’s job as a weatherman as he walks away.  Very upset about Jonas’s theft of his concept, Bill vows to help Jo and get DOROTHY to work.

Twister (1996) – (c) Warner Bros.

Weather conditions deteriorate and there are reports of tornadoes in the area.  Both storm chasing teams race to the location.  Bill drives Jo’s truck, and the two of them lead the way while bickering back and forth about usual estranged husband and wife stuff.  They spot the tornado in a field and attempt to get in front of the damage path to set up DOROTHY I.  Bill gets stuck in a ditch and him and Jo are forced to abandon the truck and seek shelter.  They hide under a small wooden bridge as the F1 tornado passes over them, taking Jo’s truck and tossing it onto the road.

Twister (1996) – (c) Warner Bros.

The team receives reports of more tornadoes, so they put DOROTHY II into Bill’s truck and drive to the new location with Melissa riding in the back seat.  They pass by Jonas’s team when Bill suddenly hits the brakes and stops.  There’s a shift in the tornado’s updraft.  He changes roads and heads in a new direction for the interception.  Jonas’s is upset when sure enough the tornado changes path and his team misses the interception.

Twister (1996) – (c) Warner Bros.

The tornado is a strong F2 as Bill races towards it in his pickup truck.  Melissa answers an embarrassing phone call from one of her patients as heavy rain begins hitting their truck.  Bill has the other chase vehicles back off as he, Jo and Melissa head straight towards the tornado.

Twister (1996) – (c) Warner Bros.

They drive alongside a lake when the F2 tornado becomes smaller in size and then splits into a multiple-vortex tornado.  A cow is caught in the high winds and flies past their truck.  Bill stops the truck as the high winds spin the truck around a few times.  The tornado quickly dissipates, leaving behind two thrilled storm chasers and a terrified passenger.

Twister (1996) – (c) Warner Bros.

The storm chasers pressure Jo to let them visit her Aunt Meg (Lois Smith) in the nearby town of Wakita, Oklahoma.  When they arrive, Meg is happy to see everybody especially Bill.  The team feasts in the dining room and tells Melissa tales of how Bill became known as “The Extreme.”  Meanwhile, Meg tries to comfort Jo with her struggle to rekindle her marriage with Bill.

Twister (1996) – (c) Warner Bros.

Once again there are reports of the weather deteriorating, so the team leaves Meg’s house in a hurry and hits the road.  They drive along country back roads until finally popping up on the highway, nearly running Jonas’s team off the road.

Twister (1996) – (c) Warner Bros.

There’s an F3 tornado lurking ahead somewhere beyond the hills and trees.  The only problem is that this tornado is “hopping,” skipping along the ground and constantly re-developing.  Jo drives the truck as Bill climbs in the back to activate DOROTHY II.  They’re hit with chunks of hail and a boat goes flying past the truck.

Jo and Bill stop and prepare to place DOROTHY II on the road.  Suddenly, a telephone poll snaps and lands on the back of the truck, destroying DOROTHY II.  Jo wants to pick up the pieces and still use the components, but Bill pulls her back to safety.  They get into an argument about their marriage and Jo’s obsession with chasing tornadoes, something Bill believes is because the death of her father.  Melissa overhears the conversation on the CB radio and realizes that Bill still cares for Jo.

Twister (1996) – (c) Warner Bros.

The team calls it a day and heads to a small town with a garage, hotel and drive-in cinema.  Jo signs the divorce papers as Bill and Melissa check into a hotel room and the team works on repairing the vehicles and their equipment.

Twister (1996) – (c) Warner Bros.

It’s night and the drive-in theater is playing The Shining when an F4 tornado approaches out of nowhere.  People take shelter in the garage as the strong tornado destroys the local area.  Nobody is seriously injured, but Dusty informs Bill and Jo that the tornado is tracking straight to Wakita.  Melissa informs Bill that she’s heading back home and not going to marry him.  Saddened at the news, Bill heads off to Wakita with everybody else to help Aunt Meg.

Twister (1996) – (c) Warner Bros.

Sure enough, Wakita is completely destroyed by the F4 tornado.  Jo is in shock as they drive through town and see the devastation.  A small family of three reminds her of when she was a child.  Meg’s house is in shambles and on the edge of collapsing.  They climb inside and help a dazed and wounded Meg climb out of the wreckage.  Bill then goes back inside to rescue Meg’s golden retriever.  Just after he escapes with the dog, the house collapses.  Meg is taken away in an ambulance for observation at the local hospital.

Twister (1996) – (c) Warner Bros.

The group learns that an F5 tornado is forming about twenty-five miles from their position.  While hearing the news and looking at Meg’s strange lawn sculptures, Bill and Jo suddenly realize how to fix the two remaining DOROTHYs and make them fly better into the storm.  Night magically turns into day as some of the chasers make repairs to the sensors while the others drive towards the F5 tornado.

Twister (1996) – (c) Warner Bros.

Bill and Jo race ahead and deploy DOROTHY III on a road in the path of the monster tornado.  They then pull back and eagerly await seeing their invention work.  But it doesn’t.  DOROTHY III just sits on the road as the F5 tornado makes a close path.  They realize that it’s too light to be picked up and carried by the tornado.

Twister (1996) – (c) Warner Bros.

Jonas’s team is also approaching the F5 tornado and moving in for an intercept.  Knowing that the F5 isn’t going to last for much longer, Bill tries to give Jonas advice on how to anchor the device so it’ll be carried into the tornado.  Jonas ignores him and ignores him again when Bill warns of the tornado shifting its path.  Jonas insists on driving on the road and he’s swept into the storm.  Jonas and his driver are both killed.

Twister (1996) – (c) Warner Bros.

Bill and Jo know what they have to do if they want to succeed today.  Bill drives straight towards the F5 tornado and Jo activates DOROTHY IV in the back of the truck.  He steers straight into the storm, sets the cruise control, and him and Jo jump from the truck.  They both watch as the driverless truck heads right into the tornado.  The sensors are carried into the F5 tornado and DOROTHY IV is a success.  The chase team records the data as the sensors are carried higher into the tornado.

Twister (1996) – (c) Warner Bros.

All seems well for Bill and Jo until the F5 tornado shifts its motion again.  The two of them run for their life as the tornado chases them through farm country.  They’re able to get into a barn and anchor themselves onto a set of pipes that run deep underground.  The F5 tornado strikes and Bill and Jo are pulled into the air as the ropes and belts keep them anchored to the pipes.  The tornado eventually passes and things are calm once again.  Bill and Jo are back together and seem eager to begin working with their new data in the storm lab.

So is Twister any good?

Not really.  There’s a LOT of Hollywood and very little reality in this tornado-themed film.

For starters, it’s rare for storm chasers to encounter a single tornado let alone five of them in one day with the last being the rarest one of them all.  F5/EF5 tornadoes might strike once or twice a year in the U.S.  Between 2000 and 2006 there was not a single EF5 or suspected EF5 tornado reported anywhere in the country.

Modern storm chasers might be able to encounter one or two tornadoes in a single day if they have a little bit of luck on their side.  From our advanced communication capability to significantly advanced Doppler weather radars to a better understanding of the storms, we’re light years ahead of predicting and tracking these storms compared to the mid 1990s.

It’s hilarious early in the movie when Bill takes a sample of dirt and tries to analyze the sky and weather conditions, like he can see into the mind of the storm and know what’s going to happen.  That may work for predicting bad weather on a large scale, but using that “skill” to predict tornadoes of all things is just ridiculous.  You really need to know what’s happening inside of the storm cells to know if there’s a chance of it producing a tornado or not.

Twister takes a severe drop in quality right after they rescue Aunt Meg from her partially collapsed house.

It starts when there’s a report of an F5 tornado a measly twenty-five miles away from them.  Yeah, right.  The area has been rocked by tornadoes all day and the atmosphere should be stabilized by that point.  It’s extremely doubtful that there would still be enough energy to produce a weak tornado let alone the mother of all tornadoes at that point.

The weather magic continues as night is suddenly turned into day.  One moment people are watching a drive-in movie and settling down for the evening, and less than an hour later it’s the middle of the afternoon again.  Ummm, can we at least have a little bit of consistency here?

Twister gets worse as Bill and Jo try to intercept the F5 tornado.  The 200+ mile-per-hour wind should have wrecked much more havoc than what we saw in the film.  A tornado with winds that powerful and a base over a mile wide would have completely destroyed that region along with most items anywhere near its path.

The movie becomes hilariously bad again when random objects get dropped directly in front of Bill and Jo’s pickup truck.  All of a sudden they’re dealing with gasoline tankers, farm equipment, and then an entire house that gets rolled onto the road.  And despite the incredibly powerful winds pushing and carrying these mighty objects around them, Bill doesn’t seem to have any trouble driving his truck.  Nor is his truck pushed off the road or tossed through the air.  Amazing!

Speaking of the tanker truck, check out the explosion and how a different red pickup truck emerges from the flames instead of the beat up truck Bill and Jo are using.  The new truck has its windows up, there isn’t a single scratch in the windshield, and it looks nice and shiny.  It’s nothing like the damaged and beat up truck Bill drove into the explosion.  Again, these lack of consistencies in the movie are just plain sloppy.

So is there anything good about Twister?

Sure.

For starters, the film has a great cast.  From Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt to Carey Elwes to Philip Seymour Hoffman, almost all of the actors and actresses do a great job in the movie.  It’s a great cast for this type of movie.

Second, the soundtrack is just plain awesome.  The movie has a great score complemented with some solid rock music from Van Halen and Eric Clapton.  This is probably one of my top-five favorite movie soundtracks.

And finally, the tornadoes themselves look pretty good.  Computer animation was starting to roll in the mid 1990s, and the tornadoes and storm clouds look great in Twister.  It’s interesting reading how most of the movie was actually filmed on bright days, and it took camera tricks and computer effects to darken the skies and create the severe weather.

Believe it or not, but Twister was actually the second highest-grossing film of 1996.  The winner for that year was Independence Day.  Twister‘s overall success helped inspired Universal to add the movie as an attraction in its Universal Studios Florida theme park.

Twister . . . Ride It Out simulates the experience of being in a tornado.  The attraction’s first preshow has Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt briefly telling us what it was like to make such a movie.  After that a second preshow takes place inside of a damaged house and shows us more behind the scenes of Twister.

The main show for Twister . . . Ride It Out takes place in the drive-in cinema from the movie.  The audience stands in a shelter as a tornado arrives and wrecks havoc.  A series of fans along with smoke projectors actually produce a rotating vortex of air about ten feet in front of you.  It’s a pretty cool effect and a fun attraction.

Twister (1996) – movie trailer

As far as Twister, you really need to shut off your brain if you want to enjoy the movie.  The action scenes are good, the visual effects are great, and the soundtrack is just plain awesome.  Twister is a thrill ride of a movie.  Just don’t expect much of reality in this one.

[Bill and Jo are arguing while driving into severe weather.]

Beltzer – “Hey, you guys want to wrap this up pretty soon?”
Bill – “What?”
Beltzer – “Oh, nothing. I was just wondering if you wanted to chase this tornado, or if you just wanted to catch the next one.”
Bill – “Shit!”

———————————

Bill – “Jo, things go wrong. You can’t explain it, you can’t predict it. Killing yourself won’t bring your dad back. I’m sorry that he died, but that was a long time ago. You’ve gotta move on. Stop living in the past, and look what you’ve got right in front of you.”
Jo – “What are you talking about?”
Bill – “Me, Jo.”