What happens when you have a couple who are on the verge of divorce, but then are brought together because their own profession won't let them go? You get the 1996 science fiction/disaster film TWISTER.
Bill Paxton portrays a TV news weatherman who has to go out into the field to find his soon-to-be-divorced wife (Helen Hunt) to get her to sign divorce papers. He has to go out and do it like this because, as it turns out, it is the middle of spring in Oklahoma, and that means it is tornado season. Hunt and her team are out there to test a new revolutionary device that is intended to measure the dynamics of this most violent meteorological phenomena, one that is an unfortunate fixture in life in the Midwest during the spring. It is this obsession that Hunt has been nursing since she lost her father as a young girl during a violent tornado in June 1969, that Paxton can't necessarily tolerate in her. But even as he intends to wed his second wife Melissa (Jami Gertz), Paxton is drawn back into the field with Hunt and her rough-and-tumble team of storm chasers. Soon, they get much more than they bargained for, when a series of increasingly violent tornadoes start ravaging the Oklahoma landscape. But they have competition in this somewhat insane race to map the inside of a tornado from a renegade bunch, led by Cary Elwes, who, to put it mildly, not only don't play fair, but they don't play it safe either (though playing it safe with a violent 200 mile-per-hour force of nature is impossible to begin with anyway). And at the end, it comes down to chasing a monstrosity of a twister that ranks as a '5" on the Enhanced Fujita measuring scale, with winds approaching apocalyptic speeds of 300 miles per hour and above.
While there is an unusual amount of clunky dialogue, given that Michael Crichton, known for JURASSIC PARK, WESTWORLD, and THE ANDROMEDA STRIAN, co-wrote this with his wife Anne-Marie Martin, TWISTER nevertheless has a lot to recommend all the same. Much of the credit has to go to Jan DeBont, whose second film this is as a director; he had done the cinematography on, among other films, DIE HARD and THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER, and then got into the director's chair with the justifiably much lauded 1993 action/suspense blockbuster smash SPEED. Even though the back-and-forth bickering between Paxton and Hunt in the first half of the movie is definitively irritating, and Gertz's performance is rather wobbly, once TWISTER gets into high gear with the twisters becoming increasingly violent and destructive, the intensity of the suspense ratchets up; and the special effects, accurately depicting what people in the Midwest and the South experience all too often from March through June. The film is also helped out by some witty references to legendary filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, in that two of the characters in Hunt's team, played by Nicholas Sadler and Ben Weber, are named, respectively "Kubrick" and "Stanley", and one of the twisters hits a small-town drive-in that is showing Kubrick's 1980 horror classic THE SHINING.
Given that this was arguably the first significant disaster film Hollywood had done since the genre's supposed demise at the end of the 1970's, and despite its problems, TWISTER doesn't go as over-the-top in its super-destruction theatrics as Roland Emmerich arguably would in his hyper-apocalyptic opuses to come. For those reasons, I am willing to give TWISTER an '8' rating, because it is still as memorable and accurate in its depiction of this cataclysmic real-life phenomena of Mother Nature in 2022 as it was in 1996.
Bill Paxton portrays a TV news weatherman who has to go out into the field to find his soon-to-be-divorced wife (Helen Hunt) to get her to sign divorce papers. He has to go out and do it like this because, as it turns out, it is the middle of spring in Oklahoma, and that means it is tornado season. Hunt and her team are out there to test a new revolutionary device that is intended to measure the dynamics of this most violent meteorological phenomena, one that is an unfortunate fixture in life in the Midwest during the spring. It is this obsession that Hunt has been nursing since she lost her father as a young girl during a violent tornado in June 1969, that Paxton can't necessarily tolerate in her. But even as he intends to wed his second wife Melissa (Jami Gertz), Paxton is drawn back into the field with Hunt and her rough-and-tumble team of storm chasers. Soon, they get much more than they bargained for, when a series of increasingly violent tornadoes start ravaging the Oklahoma landscape. But they have competition in this somewhat insane race to map the inside of a tornado from a renegade bunch, led by Cary Elwes, who, to put it mildly, not only don't play fair, but they don't play it safe either (though playing it safe with a violent 200 mile-per-hour force of nature is impossible to begin with anyway). And at the end, it comes down to chasing a monstrosity of a twister that ranks as a '5" on the Enhanced Fujita measuring scale, with winds approaching apocalyptic speeds of 300 miles per hour and above.
While there is an unusual amount of clunky dialogue, given that Michael Crichton, known for JURASSIC PARK, WESTWORLD, and THE ANDROMEDA STRIAN, co-wrote this with his wife Anne-Marie Martin, TWISTER nevertheless has a lot to recommend all the same. Much of the credit has to go to Jan DeBont, whose second film this is as a director; he had done the cinematography on, among other films, DIE HARD and THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER, and then got into the director's chair with the justifiably much lauded 1993 action/suspense blockbuster smash SPEED. Even though the back-and-forth bickering between Paxton and Hunt in the first half of the movie is definitively irritating, and Gertz's performance is rather wobbly, once TWISTER gets into high gear with the twisters becoming increasingly violent and destructive, the intensity of the suspense ratchets up; and the special effects, accurately depicting what people in the Midwest and the South experience all too often from March through June. The film is also helped out by some witty references to legendary filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, in that two of the characters in Hunt's team, played by Nicholas Sadler and Ben Weber, are named, respectively "Kubrick" and "Stanley", and one of the twisters hits a small-town drive-in that is showing Kubrick's 1980 horror classic THE SHINING.
Given that this was arguably the first significant disaster film Hollywood had done since the genre's supposed demise at the end of the 1970's, and despite its problems, TWISTER doesn't go as over-the-top in its super-destruction theatrics as Roland Emmerich arguably would in his hyper-apocalyptic opuses to come. For those reasons, I am willing to give TWISTER an '8' rating, because it is still as memorable and accurate in its depiction of this cataclysmic real-life phenomena of Mother Nature in 2022 as it was in 1996.