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Twister
(1996)
Review by Earl
Green
In 1969, young Jo's father is killed when a large tornado
destroys her family's Oklahoma home. 27 years later, Jo has grown up and
does meteorological field research, trying to track down tornadoes to learn
how they form and how warning time can be increased. One atypical day of
storm-spotting is interrupted when Jo's ex-husband and former co-researcher
Bill drops by - with his new fiancee in tow - to pick up her signed
divorce papers. But Jo has a surprise for him - a scientific instrument she
and Bill designed together was finally been built, and today is its first
test. Between that and the fact that Jo hasn't finished signing the papers
as promised, Bill and Melissa follow Jo's team of storm chasers when the
weather begins to turn severe. A brief run-in with old academic rival
reveals that Bill's design for the "Dorothy" device has been copied by
others. Bill agrees to lead his former storm-chasing colleagues one last
time so he can ensure his invention's success, but he and the equally
fiercely competitive Jo can barely get along with each other. The first
tornado they see almost kills them before they can deploy a "Dorothy" in its
path of destruction - and Melissa is almost killed by flying debris (namely,
Bill and Jo's abandoned truck). But between their explosive personalities
and their competition, Jo and Bill are hell-bent on launching "Dorothy" into
a twister - regardless of the perils along the way.
Twister is actually a decent movie, if you jettison any notion that
there is any scientific accuracy to it whatsoever (see "Oops," below). The
damage in the various twisters' wake is at least portrayed accurately, but
out of dramatic necessity the storms themselves were punched up in
intensity. (At least Twister is more plausible than the Family Channel's
TV movie Night of the Twisters, which had to be one of the dumbest endeavors
ever in the history of phosphor dots on a screen.) Twister's appeal lies
more in the characters, their personalities and their interaction. Sure,
even there some things are hard to swallow - who cares if a storm chasing
expedition is commercially funded or academically funded so long as it
gathers vital information? - but there is something interesting about many
of the characters. I always have to cite the storm chasing wild man Dusty
as one of my favorites - for that part of the country, and this isn't meant
badly, that character is actually dead-on accurate: he's crazy, funny, wild,
but basically a good guy who would go out of his way to help save someone
from a crumbling house. And further, from a sort of watered-down,
pseudo-mythological point of view, Dusty's loyalty to Bill is sort of like
a squire's loyalty to his knight.
Many of the rest of the chase team are also sadly under-explored, though
their scenes offer lots of fun evidence of a history of having worked
together for a long time. The line "That's no moon, it's a space station!"
- an homage to Star Wars - caught me off guard and made me laugh out loud.
Aunt Meg's steaks look pretty damn good, too! The minor characters really
rang true for me.
On the downside, Jami Gertz's character, who thankfully disappears about
two thirds of the way through the film, is too impossibly arch for us to take her
seriously, and as such you can also pretty much guess that she's going to
bail on Bill before the last tornado touches down. In a similar vein, you
just know that Cary Elwes' smug Jonas character has to bite it by the
movie's end because he's an Evil Commercially-Funded Storm-Chasing Dude.
The music, with its Copland-esque, all-American sound, is positively
perfect for this movie, and may turn out to be my vote for this decade's
best "fit" for a movie and its music. The outdoor photography, especially
the sweeping scenes which show virtually all of the vehicles pursuing the
storm, are outstanding. (I can also tell you with some authority that these
scenes also looked authentically Oklahoman.) The effects are amazing, and
Jan De Bont may well be the best action director in the world (though one
can only hope he'll do better with Godzilla than he did with the abysmal
and expensive Speed 2).
Twister isn't a horrible movie. It really wants to be a good movie. And
for my money - especially since tornadoes and severe weather have always
been an interest of mine - it's a far, far better tornado movie than
anything that came before it. But it could have been even better - so much
of the misplaced scientific jargon jars in my mind, as it did with many
other residents of Tornado Alley, it's hard to see past it.
One other funny note - for all my complaints of Twister's misuse of
meterological terminology and some of the more unlikely elements of the
plot, it actually could have been much, much worse. A Missouri screenwriter
named Stephen Kessler recently attempted to sue Amblin, claiming that
Twister liberally ripped off elements from a script he had been shopping
around under the title of Catch The Wind. Kessler's script involved a team
of researchers undertaking the hazardous task of positioning themselves
dangerously close to a tornado for the express purpose of releasing an
airborne device that would "kill" tornadoes. Needless to say, the court
ruled in Amblin's favor, and Kessler was left holding nothing but his legal
fees and a script that doesn't even live up to the sad standard of the
Family Channel's hideous Night of the Twisters. At least the
script that was produced was very loosely based upon an actual project which
NOAA carried out in the early 1980s with the TOtable Tornado Observatory
(TOTO) program - which was similar only in that it was an instrumentation
package built into an empty oil drum. The TOTO project was never really
considered a success.
- screenplay by Michael Chrichton & Anne-Marie Martin
- directed by Jan De Bont
- music by Mark Mancina
- Cast: Helen Hunt (Jo), Bill Paxton (Bill), Jami Gertz (Melissa), Cary Elwes
(Jonas), Lois Smith (Aunt Meg), Philip Seymour Hoffman (Dusty), Alan Ruck
(Rabbit), Sean Whalen (Sanders), Scott Thomson (Preacher), Todd Reid
(Belzer), Joey Slotnick (Joey), Wendie Josepher (Haynes), Jeremy Davies
(Laurence), Zach Grenier (Eddie), Gregory Sporleder (Willie), Patrick
Fischler (The Communicator), Nicholas Sadler (Kubrick), Ben Weber (Stanley),
Anthony Rapp (Tony), Eric LaRay Harvey (Eric), Abraham Benrubi (Bubba),
Jake Busey (Mobile Lab Technician), Melanie Hoopes (Patty), J. Dean Lindsay
(Dean), Dan Kelpine (Diner Mechanic), Sharonlyn Morrow (Waitress), Richard
Lineback (Father), Rusty Schwimmer (Mother), Alexa Vega (Jo - 5 years old),
Taylor Gilbert (NSSL Scientist Bryce), Bruce Wright (NSSL Scientist Murphy),
Gary England (TV Meteorologist #1), Jeff Lazauer (TV Meteorologist #2), Rick
Mitchell (TV Meteorologist #3), John Thomas Rhyne (Paramedic), Paul Douglas
(Badger), Samantha MacDonald (Drive-in girl), Jennifer L. Hamilton (Drive-in
girl), Anneke De Bont (Farm Girl)
- Oops:I lived on the border of Arkansas and Oklahoma for 25 years, so I've
seen a tornado or two, one of them quite up-close. So let me tell you what
dozens of 'net nitpickers and TV weathermen have already told you - most of
the "science" in this movie is wildly bogus. No one - from the National
Weather Service on down to Jay Hilgartner on channel five - has enough
information to get on the air and say "Kiss your ass goodbye, there's an F-4
on the way!" The Fujita scale is determined post-mortem - an admission made
even in the script when one of the characters says that Fujita readings are
determined by how much the storm "eats." The base width of a tornado is
also left for the postgame report. And tornadoes are generally not as
long-lived as the almost hurricane-like storm at the end of the movie.
It amuses me to hear how many actual meteorological terms are used with
no context, or in some cases no knowledge, by the screenwriters. At one
point when a tornado abruptly dissipates, one character blurts "It's the
cone of silence!" What the hell? In actuality, the cone of silence is a
conical area immediately above a doppler radar in which no readings can be
gathered because doppler radar does not scan straight up. But what does it
mean to this scene? Absolutely nothing. And what did the scriptwriters
know about the term? You figure it out. Any mention of the cone of silence
would have been better placed in the drive-in theater scene when the storm
catches our heroes unawares; a scene which, instead, included a non-sequitur
mention of "downdrafts and microbursts." You can't learn everything from a
Weather Channel storm chasing special, folks.
And let's not even talk about how many times Bill's windshield is all but
shattered, and appears without a scratch in the next scene...!
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