Twister (1996)
Director: Jan de Bont
Screenwriters: Michael Crichton, Anne-Marie Martin
Starring: Helen Hunt, Bill Paxton, Jami Gertz, Cary Elwes, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Lois Smith, Alan Ruck
At a certain point, one has to ask themselves an important question: what’s the most Spielberg a film can get when Steven Spielberg is only producing through his company, Amblin Entertainment? If your answer is Twister, a film co-written by Michael Crichton (who amongst many things, wrote Jurassic Park, directed by Spielberg a few years earlier), then you might be on the money. A disaster film that made an absolute killing at the box-office (becoming the second highest-grossing film of 1996) and two Academy Award nominations for Visual Effects and Sound, Twister proves that all you need for an iconic shot is a cow in the grips of a twister flying across the path of your protagonists.
It’s tornado season in Oklahoma. Bill Paxton plays Bill Harding, a former stormchaser turned weatherman who goes to get divorce papers signed by his estranged wife, Jo (Helen Hunt). It turns out that Jo has finally built their dream project; Dorothy, a device which releases hundreds of sensors into the middle of a tornado to capture its velocity, temperature, etc., and could improve warning forecasting from three to fifteen minutes, saving countless lives. But Jonas Miller (Cary Elwes), a rival chaser with corporate backing, has stolen the idea, and the two teams race to use their device first and make history. All whilst Bill and Jo work out their differences. And try to survive tornadoes. And work out Jo’s past trauma, after losing her father to a tornado as a child.
Twister could have been a generic disaster movie, but manages to work because it is essentially Jaws with a tornado. Jo’s fixation on them has changed tornadoes from a meteorological phenomenon into a belief that they are controlled by a malevolent being that came specifically for her family as a child. She gives them intention and agency, and it makes all the difference. The film goes to great lengths to make the tornadoes things of menace and evil, not simply parts of nature. Jo is given a 30-years-earlier prologue backstory in the same manner as slasher films, and the beginning of Twister opens with long shots of dark and brooding clouds, danger imminent. Crichton uses all of his skills in tense horror writing and, alongside co-writer Anne-Marie Martin, offers an intimate narrative of human beings being driven beyond obsession to do battle with something beyond understanding.
It is this personal take on a disaster film that makes it work so well, much in the way that Godzilla Minus One was a more intimate and personal take on the king of the monsters. You have your big visuals, your scenes of destruction – most notably with the decimation of a drive-in theatre playing The Shining (reportedly destroyed later in real life by a real tornado, whilst playing The Shining, though this anecdote may be apocryphal) – but it’s never completely ridiculous. It normally only goes for main characters, and most of the time they have to go looking for them. You don’t hear of some attack on New York with thousands of buildings being destroyed in wanton reckless chaos just for scenes of explosions and skyscrapers collapsing to the floor. Aside from one or two instances, it is usually Jo and Bill deliberately putting themselves in harm’s way to try and get Dorothy working.
Everything is personal. Bill feels responsibility for Jo, despite his new wife-to-be Melissa (Jami Gertz) being around. Bill and Jo were not only married but work partners, and Bill seems to be the only one who can stop Jo from endangering her own life. Their rivalry with Jonas is based on a personal insult, not only through the theft of the Dorothy design, but through their conflicting ideologies; “He’s in it for the money, not the science,” Bill says early on.
In a way, this is Twister’s great strength; making science cool. The corporate side are the ones always behind the curve of the true, intuitive team of Jo and Bill (who have genuine chemistry which drives the film), following their every step. The corporate jobs of therapist and weatherman are abandoned to return us to the excitement of dangerous scientific boundary-pushing. It is the thrill of the chase, the terror of the storm, and the power to push the frontiers of truth. Only true daredevils, true scientists, can do that.
The film isn’t perfect, with some cliched arguments between Jo and Bill, and the VFX is beginning to be dated, but it is a darn sight better than thousands of other disaster films out there. Twister uses its strengths wisely, and has a great supporting cast to back up a main pair that genuinely work on screen. Yes, there are moments that are stupid and dumb (a tornado picks up a massive truck but can’t rip a few planks off a footbridge they’re hiding under), but they’re also smaller and sometimes less dumb than they should be.
Score: 19/24
