Twister (1996) – Review

Ever since seeing The Wizard of Oz as a child, I’ve been fascinated by tornadoes but when it comes to their depictions in cinema they have been fairly scarce as the effects needed to create these rather unique examples of Mother Nature's fury aren’t as easy to pull off, or at least not as easy as depicting an earthquake or a hurricane, but with the advent of CGI this had now became almost as simple as hitting a few keystrokes on your computer, but technology aside a good story is still required to make it all work and that can be a problem.

The movie opens in 1969 with a tornado destroying an Oklahoma farmhouse and killing the dad, sparing the mom and little girl, and we then jump ahead to the present day where that little girl is now a Tornado Chaser, Doctor Jo Thornton (Helen Hunt), who has become obsessed with tornado since that childhood tragedy because you can’t have a scientist in a movie without some heavy emotional baggage and personal motivation that defines their career goals. We then meet her estranged husband Bill Harding (Bill Paxton) who has come back to Oklahoma with his fiancé, Melissa Reeves (Jami Gertz), to get Jo to sign their divorce papers, but what follows is twenty-four hours of intense tornado action that will somehow heal the divide between Jo and Bill because if I’ve learned anything from the movies it's that disasters are the best marriage therapists in the world, sadly, this leaves poor Melissa standing alone in the rain making her the real victim in this movie.

Justice for Melissa!

Jan de Bont’s Twister is a very fun disaster film but his decision to hang these moments of cataclysmic forces of nature on a toxic love triangle is a bit weird, especially when you consider the fact that Jo spends much of the movie passively aggressively sabotaging the relationship between Bill and Melissa, who is a very nice person and deserves none of this, just so that Jo can win Bill back, and we are supposed to be on her side? Of course, this film doesn’t just have Jo’s psychotic relationship machination subplot to keep the tension up, we also have another human villain in this piece, which comes in the form of rival "Storm Chaser" Jonas Miller (Cary Elwes) who used to be a colleague of theirs until he went “corporate” and formed his own group of storm chasers, and he is even using a piece of storm sensor technology that Bill had developed back in the day. I always find it funny when disaster movies feel the need to toss in a human villain as if the particular disaster facing the group isn’t good enough, and I have to ask "Is this because you can’t have a proper argument with a tornado or an earthquake" and to fill that bill in that area the film gives us “evil” storm chasers.

How do we know they’re evil?  They are driving black SUVs, that's how.

We’ve seen this kind of thing before in Irwin Allen’s The Towering Inferno, where corporate greed led to cutting corners in the construction of a highrise that caused a deadly fire, and in Earthquake Marjoe Gortner played a psychotic National Guardsmen who planned to rape Victoria Principle amongst the rubble of Los Angeles, but this movie doesn't give us anything as crass as that, instead, we simply get a man who Bill basically accuses of not being altruistic enough “He’s in it for the money, not the science” but this leads to such questions as “What corporation would sponsor tornado chasers?” and “Is there a lot of money in tornado chasing” It’s not like this is NASCAR or any other type of major sport that generates millions of viewers, and Jonas and his crew are driving around in these black SUVs yet we don’t see any corporate logos on any of the vehicles, which is something you’d expect a corporate sponsor to want.

I’d love to see Sprint or Pepsi try and slap a logo on the side of a tornado.

Stray Observations:

• Jo’s dad would have survived that twister, if he hadn’t stupidly tried to hold the storm shelter door, closed and, instead, simply cowered in the back of the cellar with his wife and daughter, but then we wouldn’t have had a trauma-fueled scientist as the star of our movie.
• Jo and company repeatedly refer to the tornadoes by their Fujita scale rating but as this scale is determined by the damage caused by the tornado, not by some kind of size measurement, calling them an F-2 or F-3 while currently chasing them is utter bullshit.
• Jonas is vilified for selling out to 'corporate sponsors' but this film’s blatant product placement with Pepsi makes this accusation a trifle hypocritical on the filmmaker’s side.
• Bill accuses Jonas of stealing the idea behind “Dorothy” but Jonas claims it was an “unrealized idea” so he had every right to design his own version, and he’s completely correct, you cannot patent an idea for an invention, the invention itself has to be produced or at the very least a patent application, containing the invention, must be filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
• Jo exclaims to Bill “You've never seen it miss this house, and miss that house, and come after you!” which is not something you’d expect an actual scientist to say regarding tornados as they are not some sentient monsters that target particular people.
• We see the winds of the tornado hurling vehicles and houses over and around our heroes yet for some reason, this selfsame wind has no effect on Jo and Bill, clearly, they are both carrying their “Hero Death Exemption” cards.
• It takes Jo till the end of the movie to realize that “Dorothy” is too light to survive the winds of an approaching tornado, but as these winds can reach upwards of 300 mph shouldn’t that have been a concern from the earliest design stages?
• Jo and Bill survive an F-5 tornado by tying themselves to a pipe in a small wooden shed but as debris, consisting of flying wood splinters and shards of glass, was flying around them at 300 mph they would have been ripped to shreds.

Yeah, them surviving this is all kinds bullshit.

If we can look past the insane levels of “plot armour” required to keep our protagonists alive, and they should be dead multiple times over during the duration of this story, the aspect of the film that really gave me a hard time was the aforementioned forced relationship conflict between our three main characters because when it comes to sympathizing with a protagonist having a tragic backstory doesn’t give a person the right to ruin someone else's life, and Bill dumping sweet Melissia for Jo left me thinking that Melissa narrowly escaped a shitty life because Bill was totally unworthy of her, basically, if Jo and Bill had both been whisked off to Oz I really wouldn’t have cared one jot. 

Bill Paxton, the unlikely hero.

Overall, Twister has some truly jaw-dropping effects – even with its late 90s CGI the twisters on display here hold up surprisingly well – but if you look past the visceral thrills of these amazing moments of nature’s fury the basic concept of the film is pretty thin, and to call the characters on display here two-dimensional is being overly generous and the result can be best described as a victory of technology over storytelling.