After its blockbuster release in 1996, Twister held the distinction of being the first major motion picture to make it to home video in the DVD format. It was also one of the first DVDs my family ever owned. I’ve seen it more times than any movie without “Batman” in the title, and at least six times in French. It is, without a doubt, the best disaster movie ever made, bar the unique wonder of seeing Tommy Lee Jones beat a volcano by building a cul-de-sac out of concrete in Volcano.
It’s hard to pin down why the film was so successful when it first came out beyond humanity being reliably concerned over the doomed tenor of our relationship with nature. People just really like seeing unknown actors killed by a fictional God until more known actors inevitably survive, I suppose. But the film’s enduring watchability definitely has very little to do with the tornadoes themselves. Disaster movies tend to be as rote as they come, but Twister succeeds by sidestepping almost every trope the genre has grown so comfortable with over the years. Instead, the film focuses primarily on one unit of storm chasers and the returning patriarch of their crew. It’s essentially a story about going back home that happens to feature a shit ton of destruction as a bonus.
For those who misspent the last two decades of their empty lives not watching Twister ten times a year, the film follows Bill Harding (Bill Paxton), a former storm chaser transitioning into a calmer, safer new life as a weather reporter. All he wants is to put his thrilling but tumultuous tornado laden life behind him to start a new one with his fiancée Melissa (Jami Gertz). All he needs to do is get his wife Jo (Helen Hunt) to finally sign the divorce papers. Of course, when he shows up he gets swallowed up by his old running mates on a historic day for chasing twisters. A device he and Jo devised to better record storm data and improve the tornado warning system is finally ready to fly, so Bill agrees to spend one last day with the gang in exchange for getting the papers signed and this chapter closed. Nature has other plans.
The number one thing that sets Twister a cut above is the exemplary casting. Most disaster flicks are comfortable throwing a mixed bag of stars and randos to the wolves because, hell, everyone is expendable except the prettiest, biggest names. This one plays less like a slasher where more and more cast members die in tragic situations to feed the specter of the natural disaster. There are virtually no casualties among the core cast. Instead, we’re treated to a tight knit family of eccentrics brought to life by a murderer’s row of character actors, like Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jeremy Davies and Joey Slotnick. Paxton and Hunt exhibit palpable, believable chemistry, bolstered by this lived in team surrounding them with life and vibrance. These rustic oddballs run around spewing loads of science jargon with believable brio, presaging untold hours of future Discovery Channel programming, all the while quoting Star Wars and Repo Man. It’s a great counterpoint to the usual idiotic casualties these movies are filled with and makes the danger more adventurous than dreadful. On the outskirts, Gertz more than essays the tragedy of the newbie who doesn’t fit into this strange world. From the minute she steps foot into this group with her sweet, southern belle naïveté, you know she’s going to lose Bill. The pain in her eyes when she tells Bill she always thought his past chasing tornadoes was a metaphor is as tragic as her delivery is hilarious.
This is also the rare instance where a big budget blockbuster has a huge array of writers whose mitts have been all over the script but the finished product isn’t a muddled mess. The final credits went to Michael Crichton and his then wife, Anne-Martin, which explains the tight, high concept structure and efficient storytelling. Each individual storm/set piece feels like it’s own little act, building and building to a satisfying crescendo of collateral damage and catharsis. Joss Whedon, Steven Zaillian, and Catch Me If You Can scribe Jeff Nathanson all had their hands in the revisions, which usually would make for an inconsistent narrative voice, but it seems like the layers and layers of polish just made for tight, quotable dialogue and insanely easy to read characterization. Above all else, the film prizes simplicity without feeling lowest common denominator. Bill and Jo’s “Dorothy” device uses little silver orbs as sensors to read storm data, but when rival storm chaser Jonas Miller reveals his knockoff device, it uses chrome cubes. You can’t just can’t beat that clear, effective delineation of antagonism.
Action cinematographer Jan De Bont shot Twister between the efficient brilliance of Speed and the ambulatory terror of misfire Speed 2: Cruise Control, but this might be his best effort as a director. He’s noted for his work with spectacle, but that’s maybe the least interesting thing about this film. The effects are great and the turbulent weather poses a heft and menace necessary for a movie called Twister, but there’s so many sharply realized moments of drama between the characters that glues the disparate tones together. The crisp Americana of the scene setting visuals distills a peace that marks the disruption of each storm. Every beat of inner calm cantilevered by the sensory overload of blackened clouds and roaring wind. The writing and the performances offer a focus and drive married to wit and heart, but it’s de Bont’s eye for imagery that makes the titular tornadoes every bit as epic as the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park or the iceberg in Titanic.