Twister

Meteorologist Bill (Bill Paxton (Trespass (1992))) travels out to rural Oklahoma to retrieve some signed (he hopes) divorce papers.  His soon to be ex Jo (Helen Hunt (Rollercoaster)) is also a meteorologist and is hesitant about putting down her signature.  Part of it is she wants to make Bill suffer for walking out on their relationship.  But the other part is she’s still in love with him.

Bill greets his old scientist friends that comprise Jo’s field team and they’re all pleasantly surprised and glad to see each other again.  But uh oh, Jo didn’t sign the last page of the settlement.  She stalls and Bill gets annoyed but suddenly one of the assistants yells out “Jo, major action!”  Everyone knows what that means but they wait for the signal.  After a moment of silently gazing into Bill’s eyes Jo gives the green light and they’re off in a frantic whirlwind to wrangle themselves…a tornado.  That’s right, they’re motherfuckin’ storm chasers.

Ok, ignoring the completely unnecessary scene that takes place before this showing Jo’s dad getting murdered by a tornado when she was a little girl this is a very good setup.  A lot of information gets doled out about the characters without feeling too contrived and having Melissa (Jami Gertz (Renegades)), Bill’s new fiancé, tag along for moral support is a smart move.  She’s basically the audience who the other people have to explain stuff to.  She ends up being the best character in the whole movie and I’m not fucking kidding.  But I’ll get back to her.

First I wanna break down Bill and Jo.  Yes, they’re clearly meant for each other.  They have a mutual fascination with tornadoes, they’re enthusiastic about their research, they’re dedicated to better understanding how a tornado works so they can develop improved warning systems to help people and they’re both bat shit crazy.

Bill goes by two nicknames, “The Human Barometer” and the way more radical “The Extreme” (he’s also called “The Most Out of Control Sonuvabitch In the Game” but I guess that’s too long for a nickname).  Now I’m not saying Bill doesn’t deserve to be called “The Extreme” but it kinda fits Jo a little better.  While Bill will put himself directly in the path of a tornado he always tries to bail out at the last moment.  Jo definitely wants to get sucked up into one.  She has a death wish and it’s frustrating to watch.  In fact it’s a wonder she made it this far in her life without getting too close to a cyclone and dying.  She’s supposed to be a professional scientist and not act like a googly eyed zombie forgetting everything she knows when she sees a tornado.

Hang on a sec though ‘cause I’m not letting “The Extreme” off the hook that easily.  This dude has serious emotional problems.  He’s antagonistic towards Jo when she tries to make polite conversation, he goes into rage mode over a competing scientist stealing his idea for a tornado study experiment and has to be held back, and he insists on driving the truck all the time even though he keeps fucking up and getting too close to the tornadoes.  However, I do love the sorta badass story about how he got his nickname.  You see one time he strolled up to a tornado while drunk and naked and cursing.  He says “have a drink” and throws a bottle of Jack Daniels at the thing.  He was so close the tornado sucked it right up.  Alright, I guess he earns “The Extreme” moniker.

So Bill and Jo are kinda boneheads.  It’s fiancé and therapist Melissa who’s astoundingly reasonable and amiable.  One of the most amazing things she does is ride along on three storm chasing sessions so Bill can share his true passion with her.  She also asks questions showing genuine interest in the topic.  She could’ve hung back from the start or tapped out after the first spin but she keeps going out there because she’s gonna stick by her man no matter how insane this activity may seem.

Melissa is also very nice to everyone, doesn’t look down on Bill’s friends or dismiss their profession.  Nah man, she’s captivated by the world she’s unexpectedly found herself in.  The good doctor even takes patient calls while she’s out there being twirled around by a tornado.  Sure, she’s freaking out but she lets the person on the other end know that she’s there for her.  She’s just a really good person.

On top of all this Melissa knows that Bill and Jo should be together and does the right thing by breaking up with Bill and letting him live the life he clearly loves with the woman he clearly still loves.  Melissa says she isn’t upset either but doesn’t know what that means.  Well I’ll tell ya.  She helped Bill see what was there all along.  He needs to be chasing storms with Jo and the gang and not tucked away in a studio doing weather reports.  He’s “The Extreme” not “The Content” and making him realize that makes Melissa feel at least fine about it.  Happy may be stretching it since she did just lose her fiancé.  But anyway, you get my point.  She wants Bill to be happy even if that means giving him up because she cares for him.  Melissa’s the best.

As for those wily tornadoes they do give you a lot of them, six scenes in total.  We see them destroying structures, flinging debris around and chasing after our protagonists all like you would want to see in one of these pictures.  For something called Twister they certainly deliver on the twister action and I commend the filmmakers for doing that.

But I will stop short of calling into question how realistic the tornadoes behave and if Bill and Jo really should’ve died several times throughout.  Yea I know everyone likes to make fun of them surviving the most violent type of tornado (F5) by tying themselves to a pipe with puny leather belts, the tornado can pick up the truck right next to them but they’re left alone, they can outrun a tornado, the twister roars and screeches like some horrible beast and blah blah blah, etc.  There’s so much in here that seems like total bullshit movie physics/science type stuff that it gets to a point where I simply don’t care.  It pelts me into submission.

The CGI used for the twisters isn’t terrible however.  I mean if you pull up footage of actual tornadoes they all look kinda fake.  This massive swirling cloud that appears randomly, damages a bunch of shit and then suddenly vaporizes seems like something too bizarre to exist in real life.  And they look truly frightening to encounter.  Fuck these things man.

Getting back to the movie, the filmmakers use a lot of wind, lighting and rain effects to stand in for the tornadoes most of the time because CGI was still expensive as hell in 1996 and had limited uses.  If you couple that with all the props like full sized tankers, tree branches, wood boards, farm equipment and etc being flung around and dropped from the sky the effects are nicely done and convincing.

On the negative end there’s a shocking amount of excess stuff that didn’t need to be in this picture.  I already cited the opening scene.  Merely mentioning that Jo’s father was taken out by a tornado is all you need to do, we don’t have to see it with our own eyes.

Another superfluous aspect is the very high number of members on Jo’s science team.  There should be Bill, Jo, two other assistants and maybe that one navigator guy (Alan Ruck (Star Trek: Generations)) with all the maps ‘n shit whose job ironically would be obsolete in a short ten years or so.  But Jo has no less than ten members including herself and Bill.  And it’s not like they all have a specific purpose.  Most of these characters don’t do anything except spew one line of science jabber.

And among the redundant team members is Dusty (Philip Seymour Hoffman (Red Dragon)), who’s there for comic relief and to try to get the audience pumped by yelling shit like “we got one!” and “it’s coming, it’s headed right for us!”  God I hate this obnoxious quasi hippie character.  He’s not funny, he’s not helpful, he’s just a doofus.  Is this asshole even a scientist of any kind?  He doesn’t say anything science-like or observe weather patterns or study data that’s been gathered or anything.  He’s an exasperating pest who contributes jack shit to the field work.

Out of everything though perhaps the most pointless element in the film is the inclusion of the rival storm chasers.  They’re sellouts in it for that sweet life threatening up close tornado observing money, or something.  Everything about them is designed to be a direct contrast to Bill and Jo’s team.  The sellouts dress in stiff slacks and polo shirts as opposed to denim and flannel, they drive uniform black minivans which is definitely less cool than the hodgepodge of vehicles in Jo’s fleet, their tiny tornado sensors are angular cubes instead of smooth orbs and etc.  The film makes you believe these guys are going to play a big role in the upcoming events but it turns out they have absolutely no bearing on the story whatsoever.  If you took them out not a damn thing would change.  They’re only here so the tornado can have someone to kill later, and even then it’s only two out of the entire team.

I actually have something to say on the death of the sellouts and it’s this: what the fuck did they ever do to deserve the gruesome demise they got?  Like one guy gets impaled by a metal lighting truss and then their car gets tossed through the air and explodes in a huge fireball.  Man, that death sentence is severe.  I get that these guys are jerks but as far as we know they never endangered anyone’s life, circulated false science into the community, punched someone in the face or anything.  Yea, they stole Bill’s tornado observation experiment but their goal was to help people by crafting a better early warning system, same as Bill’s.  The tornadoes are the villains here.  They didn’t need human bad guys as well.

One last thing I want to mention is the strange way this movie maligns weather reporters.  Bill gives up storm chasing to become one and as a result everyone kinda gives him shit for it.  I guess relaying weather newscasts to the public who rely on that information to know if a fucking tornado is headed their way isn’t as noble as deliberately and perpetually putting yourself in the path of that deadly force of nature.  What’s with those weather reporters trying to warn people about imminent danger and aiding them in what they can do to remain safe?  Gosh, what a bunch of losers.

Of course I’m being sarcastic but really, for all the glory they bestow upon storm chasers the way they’re portrayed here is probably insulting.  I don’t know shit about meteorology or any of that but I get the strong feeling that this picture makes people who study tornadoes look like irresponsible idiots.  They come off more like thrill seekers in search of a high than seasoned specialists who have enormous respect for what they’re studying.  I dunno.

Anyway, you add all this up and unfortunately you get a movie that’s pretty stupid.  That may sound harsh but none of it makes much sense if you think about it.  At the same time the movie does have that big summer popcorn blockbuster feel which is wonderful.  And I really mean that.  For all the bad mouthing I just did the film goes down no problem.

Longtime cinematographer turned director Jan de Bont followed up his fucking tremendous debut Speed with this.  He had been in the industry thirty plus years by 1996 and that’s what shows up on screen and makes the thing so easy to watch.  The man knows the language of big Hollywood film and how to satisfy a mainstream audience.  He only made five movies during his short directing career but they were all in the blockbuster style and Twister is no exception.  It’s a loud, fast paced, larger than life action adventure spectacular with just the right amount of hokey romance and comic relief sprinkled in to make it appealing to a boatload of people.

This was part of the natural disaster genre comeback in the 90’s and it was a big deal when it came out.  I remember they were showing real tornado footage in the lobby to get folks juiced and goddamn did it work (for the record I don’t recall them showing tornadoes damaging anything so they kept it tasteful, probably, potentially, actually I don’t have any way of confirming that).  The subject matter was deserving of a large scale Hollywood production and it paid off.  Twister was a monster hit.

While this one is a good time overall it has a lot of fucking problems.  The way the characters are introduced and the initial setup scene is well done but other than that things are a mess.  Although, I can’t deny the film does everything you want it to do.  There are plenty of tornadoes, they cause destruction, they put the protagonists lives in danger at various moments and our leads fall back in love by the end.  The essential beats are hit.  And everything else is stupid.

Twister was such a success that Universal Studios made an attraction out of it.  Basically it was a recreation of the drive-in movie scene from the film and we got to see a tornado destroy a bunch of stuff.  It included real sets, props, fire, water, wind, an unconvincing cow flying by on cables and a decent sized tornado all meticulously timed to give you a glimpse of what these things can do.

The attraction is long gone now though and admittedly I never thought too much of it whenever I did it over the years.  But the last time I took a ride I got to experience the front row with maybe only like five other people.  It was like a private showing.  Seeing the special effects demonstration that up close including the fifty foot tall tornado that was created indoors was incredibly impressive (the technology behind the ride is fascinating which involved measuring weather conditions in real time outside to help create the funnel).  It also made me realize how scary that fucking thing is and this is only a fraction of the size of a real one.  This final moment with the attraction earned it a special place in my heart and by association the stupid movie it’s based on.