Twister (1996)

If 1990s blockbuster cinema stirs any nostalgia today, it could be because most of the decade’s money-spinners were firmly rooted in a presumption of their own inconsequence, happy to be islands of ripe showmanship. Big-budget neo-drive-in movies proliferated in the decade, blithely unconcerned with birthing and protecting self-important and fan-narcotising franchises. Twister is still an exemplar of the breed, barrelling along with little care for narrative depth, and happy to parade its characters and their quandaries as pop tropes serving in much the same fashion as commedia dell’arte costuming. Co-produced by Stephen Spielberg and Kathleen Kennedy, with a script by Michael Crichton and his then-wife Anne-Marie Martin, Twister was directed by former cinematographer Jan De Bont. De Bont often worked with Paul Verhoeven when both were still making movies in the Netherlands, and picked up some of his savvy in making flashy, kinetic cinema. De Bont then helped define the Hollywood action film through shooting Die Hard (1988) and The Hunt for Red October (1990), before turning to directing and immediately scoring a huge unexpected hit with 1994’s bomb-on-a-bus film Speed. 

De Bont momentarily became a top-flight multiplex artisan but he soon got lost in pricey junk, crashing and burning with Speed 2: Cruise Control (1997), his dimwit revision of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting (1999), and Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life (2003), his last film to date. Twister was a happy medium for De Bont, not rambling on long after the bell should have rung like Speed and with De Bont’s talents for staging and shooting backed up by some experts who took real pleasure in making pop hits. Twister also has a basis in a device that more movies of its kind should exploit: personal obsession mixed with an inherently exciting occupation. Whilst it has nothing like the richness of something like Hatari! (1963), it exploits a subculture in a similar way. Twister is also today a relic of that relatively innocent phase in big Hollywood moviemaking, post-Cold War and pre-9/11, when a new special effects boom met a lack of political enemies, so filmmakers turned instead to nature and the disaster movie for impersonal, near-existential foes, joining a sprawl including Volcano (1995), Titanic (1997), and The Perfect Storm (1999). A prologue set in 1969 depicts a Midwestern farming family driven into their storm cellar by the sudden assault by an extraordinarily powerful tornado. 

The father (Richard Lineback) is sucked up into the vortex whilst trying to hold the hatch shut, leaving behind his wife (Rusty Schwimmer) and daughter Jo (Alexa Vega). Jo grows up to become tornado researcher with the form of Helen Hunt, whose focus has alienated her from her husband and fellow meteorologist Bill Harding (Bill Paxton). Bill, once known as a twister-chasing fire-eater nicknamed The Extreme, now is trying to settle down as a TV weatherman and marry a therapist, Melissa (Jami Gertz). Bill and Melissa track down Jo’s team of researchers as they’re gearing up for a potentially momentous storm outbreak in rural Oklahoma, as Bill wants Jo to finally sign their divorce papers so he and Melissa can get hitched. But Bill is quickly caught up in the thrill of the chase again as Jo is trying to deploy a specially developed sensor array dubbed DOROTHY she and Bill designed together, and Melissa is swept up in their wake as they dash haphazardly across the plains in pursuit of twisters, needing to get in the path of one to let it whisk up DOROTHY.

What little plot complication there is comes from a team of corporate-sponsored rivals, apparently representing the nefarious forces of Big Weather Research. Led by Jo and Bill’s former colleague turned yuppie scum, Jonas (Cary Elwes), the enemy team cruises about in chitinous black vans and plan to employ a filched version of DOROTHY, turning the expedition into a dangerously competitive race. Bill and Jo keep having near misses, getting one truck stuck in a ditch, another upturned, as they try to deliver their device. The open wounds of Jo’s formative trauma and the smouldering embers of her and Bill’s relationship are swiftly revived en route. Suffice to say that the story is a mere pretext for sending out the characters as audience surrogates for plunging into the maelstrom of digital effects and stunt work, in a series of spectacular and frenetic evocations of primal fury unleashed upon the homey reaches of the Midwest. Spielberg and Crichton were undoubtedly trying to capitalise on the recent success of Jurassic Park (1992), in similarly touching upon a theme of awe as fidgety science crashes into raw natural force, reaping opportunities for screen spectacle. It could also be seen as a variant on Spielberg’s first blockbuster Jaws (1975), with Hunt cast as a slightly saner, more agreeable and comely Quint, or perhaps like that film it's another permutation of the eternal Melvillian streak in American culture. Likewise De Bont had been involved with the Godzilla project that would eventually be realised to mass disappointment by Roland Emmerich.

Along the way Twister offers a glib mockery of therapeutic culture as Melissa is gently but thoroughly ribbed for offering bromides and catchphrases over her cell phone, whilst Jo gets down and dirty in working through her traumas in duels with storm cells. Twister’s attempts to get in on the epochal schism between plucky indies and corporate hacks is mildly hilarious given the film’s status as a big-budget studio blockbuster made purely to hoover in dollars. And yet there’s weird earnestness to it as well, something of Spielberg, Crichton, and De Bont’s pride as creatives leaning on their intuitive gifts for putting bums on seat invested in the proceedings. Bill, for his part, has an almost preternatural talent for reading the signs when it comes to storms, at one point tasting the dirt and smelling the air in winnowing through the variables. He can be read as a contemporary, systemically-minded equivalent of Natty Bumppo as the archetypal American frontiersman, an instinctual edge equated with creativity as the storyline touches on one of Spielberg’s familiar bugbears, good-for-nothing rip-off artists. 

Jo by contrast is the self-exorcising artist, obliged to constantly revisit her terrors to defeat them, and motivated by a desire to improve warning systems. Bill gets so mad at Jonas when he realises the depth of his intellectual larceny he has to be restrained by his friends from beating him to a pulp. Bill and Jo are intimately connected through both the awe and defiance they know in the face of a twister’s power, a power underlined unnecessarily with lines of dialogue such as Melissa asks what a F5-level tornado would be like and gets the answer, “The finger of God.” Bill and Jo’s fractious relationship must dance repeatedly up to the threshold of an event horizon of human experience in daring the tornadoes and looking their wrath right in the eye. This ritual is repeatedly frustrated, first by the tornado Bill and Jo hide from under a bridge which dissipates just as it reaches them, and with each subsequent chance going awry in some fashion before the biggest, baddest twister arrives. The finale contains a smirking subtext as Jo and Bill, in order to be reunited as a couple, must achieve the ultimate and impregnate the tornado before gaining their privileged glimpse up infinity’s funnel. 

Jo’s collective of superficially shambolic but properly skilled and dedicated weather nerds includes several soon-to-be-familiar faces, most particularly Philip Seymour Hoffman as the compulsory burly, agreeably fervent weirdo Dusty, with Todd Field, Jeremy Davies, Anthony Rapp, and Joey Slotnick in there as well, many as characters with coded Hawksian nicknames. The film takes an unseemly delight in tossing the primly suited and utterly out-of-her-depth Melissa in with this raucous collective, who tear across the prairies in bubbles of preferred fugue fuel – Dusty cranks up Deep Purple whilst another goes for the William Tell Overture, and everyone recites their preferred bad-ass movie quotes, ranging from Repo Man (1984) to Star Wars (1977). Whilst Twister purposefully exploits the basic situation to justify an extended, breathless chase movie, it does take some time out as Jo visits her aunt Meg (Lois Smith) in the small town of Wakita, whose excellence at proffering good eating is familiar and held in great esteem by the team, providing a likeable vignette of camaraderie for the motley crew and momentarily grounding the roving, thrill-seeking team in a homey, old-fashioned normality, like a touring rock band touching base with an obliging relative. The good times turn darker as a colossal twister barrels through the district at night, forcing the team to shelter in a basement at a drive-in movie theatre, and later they come across Meg’s house smashed and her lying bloodied within. Happily, it turns out she’s not badly hurt, but the last phase of the chase gains a fresh charge of urgency. Meanwhile Melissa has the good sense when to bow out with the grace of a Ralph Bellamy third wheel.

Twister could have been a much better movie, perhaps even a classic of its kind, if it had been willing to develop its Hawksian streak further. And yet its zippy, unpretentious approach offers its own brand of deliverance. Paxton and Hunt give the film what little interpersonal energy it needs, avoiding star vehicle branding and leaning instead on Paxton’s earthy charm and Hunt’s practised brand of spryly defensive humour. That side of Hunt was caught at its height just before her Oscar win ironically smothered her best qualities, well-utilised in playing a somewhat damaged person who tends to nudge aside conflicts and quotidian concerns just long enough to get on with her mania. De Bont’s talent for sustaining a thin narrative built around the necessity of careening motion is certainly unleashed, even achieving a strange kind of grace as his dashing helicopter shots chart the rival team convoys dashing along roads, converging and diverging like some kind of colossal Pac Man game, the literal lines and curves of a human-fashioned environment tormented by the seemingly chaotic and random whims of the tornadoes. Unlike many relics of the first wave of CGI effects movies, Twister hasn’t aged too badly, in large part because the kind of wonder and chaos evoked here suits the textures of such effects, the blurry, churning pillars of the tornadoes whirring along the fields and byways with a fitting sense of malevolent stature. The biggest problem with Twister’s sense of spectacle is the same now as it was in 1996, the rather too casual approach to the physics of such phenomena. Petrol tankers are hurled about with abandon and an unfortunate cow becomes a ping-pong ball between two twisters whilst standard SUVs remain steadfastly on the road, making the film feel at times like a feature-length ad for a studio tour ride, which it did indeed become.

The best set-piece is the least typical, when the nocturnal twister crashes in upon the drive-in. The tornado is glimpsed as a nightmarish silhouette against a strobing sky before it hits, tearing the movie screen upon which is projected The Shining (1980), the mimicked human violence on screen dwarfed by nature’s casual contempt, and the heroes and sundry others have to cower in a basement with random wreckage crashing above their heads: here the movie really does wield he very immediate, personal sense of the apocalypse aiming right at you that all good disaster movies need. The finale aptly turns upon a supersized, scarcely more serious take on the climax of Buster Keaton’s Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928), as Jo and Bill find themselves driving through houses literally tumbling across the landscape and dashing from shelter to shelter that offers no protection against the rampaging monstrosity that is an F5 on the loose. Jonas gets himself killed in amusingly arrogant fashion, but Jo and Bill survive thanks to the unlikely device of using horse reins to strap themselves to anchored water pipes, allowing them their moment of transcendental communion with the void. No, it’s nobody’s idea of a great movie, but Twister honours its theme of motivated professionalism: it gets the job done in style.