Having been hit by a tornado four days ago, and plagued by recurrent tornado dreams my entire life, why not go to the movies and see it all in spectacular fashion on the big screen?
In 1996, Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton played a couple on the brink of divorce, forced to work together chasing tornadoes to create an advanced storm warning system. The movie was called Twister, written by Michael Chrichton, who was then at the height of his writing career. His blend of science, technology, and thrilling plots took various forms, from The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man to Jurassic Park and a posthumous work just completed by James Patterson called Eruption. Chrichton was a 1964 Harvard grad who five years later got his MD, also from Harvard. His books all lent themselves to powerful visuals that were easily translatable to film.
Twisters is considered a stand-alone sequel, but is essentially a remake, with technology updates since the dark ages twenty-eight years ago. Daisy Edgar-Jones (Kate) and Glen Powell (Tyler) assume the combative lead roles, pitted against a common swirling enemy from the special effects department. There are plenty of rear-view mirrors here to remind us, that like T-Rex, an F-5 tornado may be closer than it appears.
Early in the film was a sequence in which four storm chasers are overtaken by a monster funnel. The challenge of finding safety is played out in excruciating similarity to a personal experience I’ve written about. It was as if our event became a scene in the film. Fortunately for us, our car and three of our friends were not sucked away and tossed into the guts of the demonic black vortex.
The ”sucked away” effect is a favorite of director Lee Isaac Chung. It’s truly disturbing, so clearly deadly and horrifying that I guess he felt it was worth repeating throughout the film. Another common stunt is the “hold-on” attempt that would rip shoulders from sockets.
It wasn’t that long ago that tornado imagery was relatively rare. But the advent of iPhones resulted in lots of really great footage, always and everywhere. Climate change has increased the number and territory of “the alley” in which they dwell. In a film like this, the multimedia artists bring to bear the full computing power of their advanced software and hardware, whereas in 1939’s Wizard of Oz, they spun bundled burlap tied together on a snaking spindle.
Impossible escapes alternate with horrific collapsing buildings and flying cars, trucks, barns and bleachers as the story progresses. The rivals discover that their ultimate goal of helping people is a common bond caused by a common enemy. But the relationship that develops is corny and predictable, with weak characters and only adequate acting. At one point a movie theater that has been almost entirely torn apart still has a projected image on the wall. I half expected a dinosaur to come gnashing its teeth through the screen into the front row.
Steven Spielberg’s production company supported this film. Perhaps Steven was waxing nostalgic on the good old days, with a kindred spirit pumping out blockbuster screenplays for him to direct.
The memorable, if not ridiculous, vintage scene in which Hunt and Paxton tie themselves to a pump handle and float inverted in the central column of a funnel is alluded to in Twisters, but I’ll never forget the flying cow and gasoline truck in the original. Those things were new then, now we expect to see the impossible, more dramatically and in greater detail.
This is probably a good one to wait for on your streaming vehicle of choice, but even with all its flaws, it held our attention and was consistently exciting.
Twisters (2024) runs 2 hours, 2 minutes and is rated PG-13.
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