This is one movie that’ll spin you right round, baby
Hold on to your hats, folks, because Twister is the movie that whipped up a storm of thrills and spills, leaving audiences breathless back in 1996. Helen Hunt starred as tenacious storm chaser Jo Harding, whose estranged husband, Bill (Bill Paxton), was trying to leave that life behind. Jo and her team were in a race against time and the elements to test their new weather-sensing device, Dorothy, which could revolutionize tornado warning systems.
Bill, now a TV weatherman, visits Jo to get her to sign their divorce papers, but nature has other plans, and he gets pulled back into the storm-chasing world, much to the chagrin of his fiancée Melissa (Jami Gertz). The team patrols the Oklahoma landscape, looking to place Dorothy in the path of a tornado to gather crucial, groundbreaking data while facing off against rival storm chaser Jonas (Cary Elwes), whose greater resources and underhanded tactics made our scrappy heroes the plucky underdogs in the race to the eye of the storm.
On release, Twister dazzled with its cutting-edge special effects. The tornadoes were terrifyingly real, sucking audiences into the chaos and the film was groundbreaking in its kinetic energy and visual realism. Director Jan de Bont knew how to keep the action relentless, and the film never let up. From houses flying apart to flying cows, the visual spectacle was the real star here, and Twister was designed to be a thrill ride from start to finish, each tornado sequence more jaw-dropping than the last.
However, where the film excelled in spectacle, it merely made a token gesture towards character development. The romantic subplot between Jo and Bill is as predictable as it is mandatory for a disaster movie, as is Melissa’s presence as a mere obstacle to the leads’ eventual reconciliation while the other “colourful” characters in Jo’s ragtag band of storm chasers could each be described in a single sentence. Even Elwes’ Jonas, the supposed antagonist, adds little actual peril to a movie that is always more concerned with pitting our characters against the might of Mother Nature rather than each other. The dialogue, likewise, often hits you over the head with its lack of subtlety, but you don’t need deep conversation when all you’re waiting for is to see what the wild weather’s going to fling across the screen next.
Twister remains today what it always was: an absolute blast, a summer blockbuster that promised big-screen blustery mayhem and delivered a deluge of dynamic disaster movie action. The easy-going chemistry between Hunt and Paxton kept you rooting for them, even when the script let them down, while the supporting cast, including Philip Seymour Hoffman as the eccentric Dusty, provided just enough comic relief to distract you during the occasional slow bits.
When stacked against other disaster flicks, Twister blows most of them away. It’s not perfect, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s an adrenaline rush, a visual hurricane, and a reminder of why we love disaster movies in the first place. So, grab your popcorn, settle in, and batten down the hatches because this movie blows – in the best possible way.
