The writer of Jurassic Park. The director of Speed. The star of Mad About You. The quaint Clinton-era notion that a major action blockbuster could be produced with, as the major antagonist, an atmospheric condition and not swarthy terrorists from the Middle East or France. Twister is so 1990s it hurts, but the pain isn’t as exquisite as revisiting a movie you once, for any number of pubescent reasons, loved as a child and now realize is a whirling roar of detritus.
When Twister came out, the traditional ’80s model blockbuster appeared to be on its last legs. Films like John McTiernan’s The Last Action Hero and Kevin Reynolds’s Waterworld made the idea of a central masculine anchor, be he mountainously monolithic or sensitively willowy, seem as ruinous as letting a young Turk hotshot direct your studio’s big epic did in the early ’80s during the aftermath of Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate. (James Cameron would end up reversing this trend quickly enough with Titanic.)
So, Twister seemed like a film with an almost experimental lack of dramatic conflict. The barebones version of the storyline—or the one-sentence version of a plot that would already be oversold with three sentences—is that a group of storm chasers spend an unusually active day out in the wilds of Oklahoma and Kansas trying to hunt down a tornado so they can impregnate it with their little data-gathering science balls and study the mechanics of what makes the storms spin. Essentially, Twister is an anthology film, with each of the five storm sequences having its own unique tenor and with the connective tissue being treated as a total afterthought.
Ballsy but refreshing, right? But no matter how much Jan de Bont keeps his camera roving, and no matter how much superfluous technobabble Michael Crichton and Anne-Marie Martin toss into the screenplay to indirectly remind the audience of the Jurassic Park mastermind’s Harvard pedigree, the DNA of the blockbuster isn’t so easily spliced and reconfigured.
Despite the sound crew operating by the logic that you can more easily hate something if it sounds alive (the altered recording of a camel’s moan was used to create the storm sounds), tornados aren’t inherently evil. And so, a band of corporate-funded sellouts posing as scientists are introduced to race against Jo (Helen Hunt) and her estranged husband Bill’s (Bill Paxton) motley band of Sherwood Forest potheads and meteorology school dropouts, having ripped off the design for Bill’s tornado instrument containing weather sensors. (If that’s not enough to make the rival storm chasers stand shoulder with the Iraqi terrorists and curvy corporate bitches of Twister’s brother action pictures, they also drive a caravan of jet-black minivans.)
Add to that a love triangle between Jo, Bill, and Bill’s fiancée, Melissa Reeves (Jami Gertz) and you’ve got enough artificial, test screening-generated “content” to blow down even Philip Seymour Hoffman’s reliably overzealous scene-hoggery as Dusty (né Dustin) Davis. When it sticks to kinetically portraying the sheer oddness of the tornadic phenomenon, Twister is a breeze. When it tries to recreate Howard Hawks, it falls gracelessly from the green sky.
Image/Sound
The transfer is good enough to reveal that even effects that seemed, at the time, ahead of the curve next to the corny models and toys of Independence Day, have not held up. It’s a tricky transfer, admittedly, and gets major points for not cluttering up the twister debris with digital debris. The colors seem a little weak, but they did in the theater too, thanks to Jan De Bont’s strategy of overlighting scenes to create an artificial stormy hue. The active, terrifying, wide-ranged surround sound is, obviously, the reason such systems were invented. And if it drowns out the dialogue, well, that just sweetens the deal.
Extras
Jan De Bont is no Werner Herzog, and neither does his commentary track come anywhere close to the majesty or candor to be found on a Herzog track. Short on gossip for a production that was rumored to be pretty grueling and at times dangerous and contentious, this is your standard commentary track. In fact, it’s actually recycled from the previous edition. The second disc contains tornado-obsessive featurettes and makings-of both new and old. The best of the bunch is a slightly newer piece from the History Channel. Fans of the film will probably most appreciate a brand-new retrospective making-of feature. And idiots will probably stick to the Van Halen video.
Overall
An anorexic premise could’ve been a great and unusual disaster film if only Twister had taken the courage to keep everything pared down.
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