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Movie Review: Twister blows away reality A storm chaser's dream come true is to get close enough to a mile-wide tornado to shoot unique video of nature's extreme fury. Maybe even take some close-up measurements of the storm's surroundings, if the situation warrants. But never will a chase team be caught racing into the middle of a cornfield toward the heart of a whirling funnel, no matter what the prize. Yet that's exactly what Twister actors Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt do as "professional" storm chasers in the debut movie of the 1996 summer season. In reality, storm chasers consider dirt roads, let alone fields of dirt, to be death traps as heavy rain can instantly turn them into axle-deep mud bogs trapping chasers and their vehicles in harm's way. Twister is full of such annoying oversights.
The husband-and-wife chase team take incredible risks no real storm chaser would dare take (that's Hollywood). Their blissful ignorance of immediate danger is aided by dumb luck every time they drive right up to each tornado. Their goal is to stick a barrel of tiny sensors into the tornado's path where they would be sucked into the twister while gathering data needed to improve an early warning system. This is plausible, cutting-edge science that just might become a reality. As this is happening, however, objects much, much heavier than their truck swing magically around them (as if suspended by giant cables from a crane, or something) while the truck remains firmly planted on solid ground.
Scene after scene defy the basic physical forces governing motion (kind of like Director Jan De Bont's "brilliant" 20 -ton bus leap across a 50 -foot opening in a nearly level highway span in his movie Speed). Sir Isaac Newton would have slapped a hand to his head and let gravity take over as he fainted in disgust. Another blatant oversight is leaving a neon sign brightly lit after a violent tornado thrashes a drive-in movie theater. Electricity is one of the first things to go during severe storms, sometimes before the first damaging winds hit.
On the movie set, cars are thrown around like toys, yet the lights are still on; makes me wonder if the lights are on, but nobody's home in De Bont's head. To be fair and not paint a totally bleak picture, Twister does have some good parts. Jamie Gertz plays a rather believable, non-tornado buff who gets dragged along on chases only to be terrified by falling trucks and flying cows. She's a shaking, babbling mess who retains enough insight to walk away before the movie's final tornado chase begins, an act perhaps we viewers should have drawn on, for the worst was to come at the end of the movie. That's when the largest tornado of the cinematic experience known as Twister envelops Paxton and Hunt as they strap themselves to a metal pipe inside a tiny wood shed.
The building is shredded, yet our iron-like chaser heroes are just a bit wind blown but otherwise unscathed. Impossible! They would have been what I like to call cat food, torn apart beyond our wildest, horribly twisted imaginations. In history, true stories of these unnatural occurrences are well documented. Take a casual read through Key Davidson's book Twister: The Science of Tornadoes and the Making of an Adventure Movie if you don't believe me. For those unfamiliar with the graphic detail of real tornado video, I will say the special effects in Twister do a pretty good job of showing the tornado's rapid circulation.
Whirling dirt and debris are depicted using dark brown and black colors, getting the maelstrom's look essentially correct. But these effects are quickly forgotten once the viewers see how unbelievably polite the tornadoes are. The twisters thrust toward the unsuspecting chasers then suddenly hesitate while the teams fumble into position before the assault continues. Wrong!
Tornadoes wait for no one. The growling and snarling sounds coming from the spinning vortices are also overdone. Real tornado chasers have often claimed large tornadoes do roar. But, the freight train rumble described by tornado survivors is a typical description for a reason. Never has a fierce tornado been described as feeding time in the lion's den. (The audio actually is a llama snarl slowed down to sound more menacing. ) Lastly, besides the multiple, pointless subplots ("good" versus "bad" chasers, Hunt's death-wish by tornado, etc. ), the technical jargon thrown in to simulate the realism avoided that minute blurb that would have tied it to something real. The phrase "LIs are - 6 to - 10 " probably meant nothing to viewers.
So why use it? It would have meant so much more had the writers said, "The atmosphere is very unstable. LIs are - 6 to - 10. " At least that way viewers easily could have tied the numbers to an unstable atmosphere ready to blow its top... or bottom, in a tornado's case.
Twister's real damage was done at the writing table or on the cutting room floor. Fears of large numbers of viewers flocking to the Plains and Tornado Alley to relive Twister's excitement seem about as far from reality as the movie's damage sequences. If the six level Fujita Tornado Damage Scale could be used to rate tornado movies, I'd give Twister an F- 2 on a scale from F- 0 (light) to F- 5 (incredible). Go out and rent a tornado documentary for some real excitement. Even before Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt see an airborne cow sail like a Chee-tos bag past their windshield, Twister ( 1 / 2 out of four) has proven itself as a summer crowd-pleaser worthy of its wind. An intentionally formulaic Hollywood adventure about profesional tornado chasers, it shows us via Jurassic Park-caliber effects, that tornadoes can chase back with a vengeance.
The leads play barnstorming scientists inexplicably about to dissolve what looks like a model marriage, and the pressures of work, his new engagement and rivalry with a third student of storms (Cary Else) lead to a few profanities. This aside, the movie's well-earned PG- 13 rating has been awarded for the "intensity" of its weather, thanks to artfully differentiated disasters plunked by director Jan De Bont into the opening, middle and roaring finale of an unflaggingly paced two-hour action event. Twister plays like a 90 s homage to the action output of Howard Hawks, who directed four decades of popular movies about outsiders gaining entry to the closed societies of pilots, race car drivers and big-game hunters. Back then, the invader was invariably a woman, but Hunt is no lightweight here. She's a pro who has helped to construct the movie's gizmo, designed to shoot transmitters into the storm to gather data that will lead to an early warning system. The movie's actual novice, who poses the elementary questions we would ask ourselves, is Paxton's fiancee (Jamie Gertz).
Even allowing for the story's conscious employment of action-genre types, the characterizations come off as blatantly underfed. The movie further reduces sources of human misery to a carny-ride attraction, as great as it is to see a flying 18 -wheeler and hear whooshing Dolby Surround. But give De Bont credit. He made his Hollywood directorial debut with 1994 's Speed, and did he ever give us speed.
Twister, in turn, earns him this year's truth-in-advertising citation. Bibliography:
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Research essay sample on Movie Review Twister Blows Away Reality
