| Field | Details |
|---|---|
| Movie Name | TWISTER (1996) |
| Director | Jan de Bont |
| Writer | Michael Crichton, Anne-Marie Martin |
| Lead Actor | Helen Hunt |
| Cast | Helen Hunt, Bill Paxton, Jami Gertz |
| Genre | Action, Adventure, Thriller |
| Release Date | May 10, 1996 (United States) |
| Duration | 1h 53m(113 min) |
| Budget | $88–92 million |
| Language | English |
| IMDB Rating | 6.6/10 |
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TWISTER shows the increasing convergence between movies and more participatory forms of pop culture, like amusement parks and videogames, and away from movies about human life and character. The driving motive is profit. More people will pay to experience a tornado than will, say, follow a nun reconciling a condemned prisoner to death.
If people are going to come, the tornado experience has to be good. Director Jan De Bont and his special-effects wizards certainly achieve that here, with more “virtual” noise, wind and flying debris of all shapes and sizes than many will want to endure.
We get roughly five big wind scenes, with computer generated cloud funnels churning up farms and towns. The sense of objects freed from gravity by 300 m.p.h. winds is uncanny and scary.
The movie’s humanity, which must largely be credited to creative force Michael Crichton (Jurassic Park, TV’s ER), is less impressive. Plot and characters are out of Screenwriting 101, despite good efforts by Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton as an estranged couple leading twister hunting scientists down the back roads and cornfields of Oklahoma’s “tornado alley.”
Bill has retired to a softer life (he thinks) as a TV weatherman and brings along his new friend (Jami Gertz), who happens to be a sex therapist, to locate Helen so she can sign the divorce papers. All three wind up chasing storms during the Midwest’s worst ever bad hair day.
Michael Kahn’s scene editing is terrific, but the writing here is mostly unintentionally funny, as when Paxton keeps urging Hunt to “hang on!” when half of Kansas and Iowa are passing overhead.
While Cary Elwes, as an unscrupulous rival, serves as a human villain, the real bad guy is nature (like dinosaurs and the great white shark in other films). In today’s technology worshiping movies nature tends to be a lingering indicator of God’s presence the dark, frightening side of the divine, still a mystery, still beyond the power of human ingenuity to understand or control. Energetic and violent thrill ride, but superficial, uneasy for the timid satisfactory for fans of the genre.
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