May 10, 1996

They’re scientists, but they’re cowboys. And they follow the wind. When they get the call they strut and they smile at each other knowingly as they hop into their Jeeps and trucks, slam on the gas and hurtle toward the danger, thinking nothing of it except ha ha, what a fun time we’re having here. They playfully exchange lingo-filled banter over the CB as they look up to the sky or down to the dots on their computer screens. They each have their own quirks and their own styles of musical accompaniment and their own ways of yelling “WAHOO!” in the face of God’s mighty wrath.

They are the wildpeople of weather, the maniacs of meteorology, the tornado terrorists, the thunder jockeys, the Doppler demons, the Hell’s Angels of nerds. They are the storm chasers, and they absolutely will not stop, ever, until they deploy their new device designed to release hundreds of small floating sensors into a tornado to measure it from the inside and obtain data that could potentially help improve early storm warning systems in the future.

They’re hard to keep track of but I believe their crew includes Dusty Davies (Philip Seymour Hoffman, THE GETAWAY), Rabbit (Alan Ruck, SPEED), Sanders (Sean Whalen, THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS, REVENGE OF THE NERDS III: THE NEXT GENERATION), Preacher (Scott Thomson, POLICE ACADEMY 1, 3 and 4), Haynes (Wendle Josepher, “Ticket Agent,” NORTH), Laurence (Jeremy Davies, “Just like punk, except it’s cars” Subaru commercial) and Beltzer (Todd Field, EYE OF THE EAGLE 2: INSIDE THE ENEMY, five years before directing IN THE BEDROOM). All of them serve their queen, Jo Harding (Helen Hunt, TRANCERS I-III, following KISS OF DEATH), who as a child (Alexa PenaVega right before THE GLIMMER MAN) witnessed her old man getting sucked out a storm shelter door and swallowed by an F5 tornado. So she’s spent her adult life tracking that fucker down trying to make it look her in the eye. Does she want revenge? An apology? I don’t know. When she sees one up close she gets kinda crazy, endangers herself saying “I want to see it!” She gets wind madness.

It would be nice if her father was still in there, spinning around with a Rip Van Winkle beard, and she gets to save him. But that would be a fairy tale. This is the hardcore, science based shit. It’s written by Michael Crichton (WESTWORLD) and his then-wife Anne-Marie Martin (an actress who was in the DR. STRANGE tv movie, PROM NIGHT and HALLOWEEN II), and you better fucking believe they watched a PBS documentary about storm chasers and probly did other research. You’re not dealing with students here. This is the principal and the vice principal.

For the first time Jo’s team is equipped with “Dorothy,” the aforementioned sensor thing, so it’s convenient that her estranged husband Bill Harding (Bill Paxton, THE DARK BACKWARD) shows up to have her sign the divorce papers, because he’s the one who originally conceived of Dorothy. But this is the life he wants behind him. He’s settling down to become a TV weatherman, and he’s very uncomfortable that everybody’s excitedly assuming he’s back, celebrating right there in front of his buttoned-up therapist fiancée Dr. Melissa Reeves (Jami Gertz, ALPHABET CITY, RENEGADES). But holy shit, they did it. That’s Dorothy. That was his dream.

And then that fucking no good corporate fuckface Dr. Jonas Miller (Cary Elwes, THE BRIDE) shows up with his own team of more highly funded nerd cowboys and his own sensor thing that’s called Dot3 and it’s the same concept as Dorothy except the sensors are cubic instead of spherical. Fucking thief. Fuck that guy. He’s got it coming. By which I mean he’ll ignore Bill’s warning about which direction the storm is going and a pylon will impale his driver and then their whole truck will fly into the sky and float around and then drop to the ground upside down and explode. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Obviously a storm is coming, Jo runs off without signing the papers, Bill and Melissa follow and get caught up in the excitement, accidentally end up on the chase with the crew, Melissa at first thinking it will be fun and interesting to meet Bill’s old friends and see what he used to do, and then very quickly realizing what have I gotten myself into, these people are god damn lunatics and I’m too nice to yell at them. Also they need me here so there’s a reason for them to explain stuff that the audience needs to know. I really hope Gertz thought this was a fun, funny role to perform and not a thankless one. She does a great job being the party pooper who can’t hang while still being sympathetic because she’s so much more reasonable than every single other character in the movie.

One thing about the team is they all go way back – WAY back – with Jo’s beloved Aunt Meg (Lois Smith, FALLING DOWN). They have chased enough storms past Wakita, Oklahoma that every one of them is like family to her, they stay in her big old house and she makes them all giant steak and eggs from cows she butchers herself (not sure about the eggs) and she gives them all folksy advice and she has cool wind-sculpture things in her front yard that I guess she made so maybe that’s why she knows so much about weather. I like them because they’re a cool visual way to tell us the storm is coming. Like the cup vibrating in JURASSIC PARK.

Joss Whedon (TOY STORY), Steven Zaillian (CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER) and Jeff Nathanson (FOR BETTER OR WORSE) did rewrites, some of them during the shoot. At least some of it was to satisfy actor requests, including Hunt wisely not wanting a bunch of sniping between the wife and the fiancée. I would argue that the inevitable rekindling of romance doesn’t ultimately work, because the unleashing-of-the-frustrations fights Bill and Jo have in the car make it clear that these two should not be together! Maybe the weatherman thing is the wrong idea for Bill, but I don’t buy that these two getting back together is gonna make anybody happy.

I don’t know that much about Crichton so I could be off base, but based on his work I’ve seen I feel very confident in assuming that he was obsessed with learning the jargon and probly made everyone involved in the movie sit for hours hearing him talk about why they should make Dorothy for real. They couldn’t run because he was 6’ 9” so he would’ve just grabbed them by their shirttails and yanked them back like a mama cat grabbing a kitten. He was one of those guys who’s in the arts but also is obsessed with scientific stuff (he went to Harvard Medical School) so he gains an aura of expertise that is deserved but eventually goes wrong. Years after TWISTER he became a major promoter of the claim that humans don’t contribute significantly to climate change. He said that environmental policy should never be politicized, then he met with George W. Bush about his book State of Fear (“eco-terrorists plot mass murder to publicize the danger of global warming”) and testified to Congress. He helped contribute to our current world where one party is so brainwashed into denying the reality of climate change that the producers of the sequel TWISTERS were afraid to mention it in the movie even though it’s a movie about how FOR SOME REASON THAT NO ONE WILL EVER KNOW there are more severe storms than when TWISTER came out. If only we had Dorothy to do some measurements, I guess. Thanks for WESTWORLD and JURASSIC PARK, Mike, but fuck you for leaving us in Hell, you bloviating human minotaur.

Anyway I don’t love, but have a certain nostalgia for, this era of big studio blockbusters where the heroes were scientists and we were supposed to be impressed by their scientificness. Usually if a movie like this gets too corny it’s not that bad because you get to see some dinosaurs or a hollow man or something. A twister is not nearly as exciting, I thought, but you know what? I enjoyed revisiting this more than I thought I would. The weird thing is that at the time it was novel to see digital effects applied to disaster scenes, but what strikes me is that it still feels more real to me than some of the modern movies done with much more advanced technology. My guess is that it’s because, like with JURASSIC PARK, the digital effects were new enough that they are a smaller percentage of what you’re looking at than you’d have today. Yes, there’s sky replacement and animated tornadoes and things, but maybe more gimbals and giant fans and debris and vehicles dropped from helicopters than you’d have to use now? At least in most movies. One trick they hopefully don’t do anymore involves bright lights that make the sky look stormy, which were a confirmed bad idea when they burned Paxton and Hunt’s retinas, temporarily blinding them.

Obviously the flying cow was CGI. Everybody loves the flying cow – it’s the main thing we remember about the movie. I felt bad for her this time, though. R.I.P. flying cow, unless you made it out of there alive, you absolute badass.

The movie was pitched to studios not with a script or outline, but with an FX test of a truck getting picked up by a tornado. Spielberg had originally planned to direct, but moved on (as he often does). Directors considered are some of the obvious ones (James Cameron, Robert Zemeckis) and one insane one (Tim Burton). I’m glad he did MARS ATTACKS! instead! Jan De Bont picked it up to be his sophomore outing as a director after his American GODZILLA hit a dead end. (I’ve read that script, it would’ve been much cooler than the Emmerich one at least.)

I definitely don’t like this as much as I like his first movie SPEED, but I think De Bont still had some of that juice. He put together some effective spectacle, he said some smart things about how to keep the story moving, and he fought for the unusual casting of Hunt, who even herself thought she was a weird choice. At the time Bill “Game over, man” Paxton seemed like an unorthodox leading man as well, but that was apparently Tom Hanks’ suggestion after he passed on the role. (Yeah, I can’t picture him in this.)

De Bont was reportedly a maniac on set, though. He pissed off much of the crew, especially when he angrily pushed a camera assistant into a ditch and refused to apologize, prompting d.p. Don Burgess (BLIND FURY, FORREST GUMP) and his crew to walk off. A week later Jack N. Green (UNFORGIVEN) and his crew replaced them and Spielberg (1941) flew in to yell at De Bont. Two days before filming ended, Green was injured by the collapsing ceiling of Aunt Meg’s house, so De Bont (a brilliant d.p. before he started directing) took over for the final shots. Green must not have blamed De Bont, because he reunited with him the next year for SPEED 2: CRUISE CONTROL.

When the sequel came out two years ago I was surprised to hear some people talking about TWISTER like it was an enduring classic that was gonna be really hard to live up to. I still don’t think it is, but at least it’s about as pretty-okay as it was at the time. And it’s funny in retrospect to see Hoffman playing a role that might as well have been written for Jack Black. This was his movie between HARD EIGHT and BOOGIE NIGHTS, so he was about to blow up.

TWISTER had the sixth largest opening weekend of any film to that date, and the fourth largest non-LION KING, BATMAN or JURASSIC PARK film. It beat LETHAL WEAPON 3 and THE FLINTSTONES to become the largest May opening ever, helping establish May as part of the summer movie season (so it has an important influence on my retrospectives). It was the second highest grossing film of 1996, first highest to be covered in this series since #1 was INDEPENDENCE DAY. But it’s still not the movie of the summer in my opinion. That’s still to come.

tie-ins/franchise followups:

There was a pinball machine. It came out a month before the movie. Probly gave away the ending.

Crichton and Martin’s screenplay was released as a mass-market paperback.

In 1998 Universal Studios Florida opened the indoor special effects attraction Twister… Ride It Out. Visitors experience a simulated storm with water, fire and moving objects, hosted by Paxton and Hunt in video and audio recordings. In 2015 it was replaced by Race Through New York Starring Jimmy Fallon.

In 2020 Helen Hunt apparently wrote a legacy sequel with BLINDSPOTTING’s Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal (!?) that she wanted to star in and direct. She had an eye toward making a racially diverse movie when that was a goal of many in Hollywood, but “We could barely get a meeting,” she said. Instead we got the unconnected 2024 sequel TWISTERS, directed by Lee Isaac Chung. It was well received, but I found it only okay, with moments of frustration. Something to do with a theme about storm chasers needing to care about the victims of the storms, illustrated by the heroine going into a town to help one (1) person briefly. I can’t really remember the details and didn’t feel inspired enough to write a review at the time. (Not ready to revisit.)