Is 'Twister' a classic or does it belong in the Suck Zone?

We start our revisit of the summer of 1996 with a look at Jan De Bont's weather adventure.

When I think back to what made me a film fan and influenced my path to write about movies, I’m often struck by how often certain years jump out just as vividly as specific titles. For example, 1993 was vital for me, as it was the year Jurassic Park captured my attention like no film had before. I often called 1999 “the year that movies broke my brain,” because the wallop of The Matrix, The Sixth Sense, Fight Club, American Beauty, The Blair Witch Project and more hit me just as an interest in cinema was turning into something deeper. And my first year as a voting member of the Detroit Film Critics Society was 2007, the year that gave us No Country For Old Men, Juno, Once, There Will Be Blood, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and many others. 

But I wonder if there was ever a period where I had more fun going to the movies than in the summer of 1996. This was the summer before my senior year of high school. It was the first summer where I had my driver’s license and a car of my own, and could take myself and my friends to the theater. It was also the summer I turned 17, meaning it was the first one where I could go see R-rated movies without a parent (I was a rule-follower and rarely tried to sneak in). And it just so happened that this was one of the biggest blockbuster summers. It was during those three months that Independence Day blew the roof off theaters by blowing up the White House. It was the summer where I laughed myself into stomach pains watching Eddie Murphy in The Nutty Professor. And it was the first time we watched Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt, a role he’s still playing in what has somehow turned into our best modern action franchise. 

I didn’t just watch these movies; I went back again and again to see them in theaters. I know I saw The Nutty Professor three times; I’m fairly certain I hit five theatrical viewings of The Rock. As soon as they were available on DVD, I scooped them up. And then -- I promptly moved on. Aside from a revisit of the first Mission: Impossible a few years back, I don’t think I’ve watched most of these movies in 20 years. Some of them I’ve soured on without really knowing why; maybe it’s time, maybe it’s just me accepting the notion that some of these big movies aren’t any good. 

So I figured it’s time for a revisit. So throughout this summer, although not with every newsletter, I’m going to be revisiting some of the films of the summer of 1996. I’m going to try and see what appealed to me as a 17-year-old and whether they still hold up or if time has dulled their shine. I don’t have a solid list of which films I’m going to write about, although I know there are some I definitely have to do. I’m looking forward to this, and hope it’s a fun way to celebrate summer movies in a year where it’s still up in the air what our movie summer is going to look like. 

So first, let’s head down to Tornado Alley…

...It feels like Twister was specifically engineered for me. I have an early memory of being in elementary school during a tornado warning. As the lights went out and we watched the wind gust outside the windows, I vividly recall asking my teacher, tears in my eyes, “where am I going to live now?” So, tornados have always fascinated and terrified me. I’ve already mentioned that Jurassic Park had changed my life, and so I was very aware of anything that Steven Spielberg and Michael Crichton were doing, especially together (I was also an ER fan). And I had recently seen Speed, which my uncle had rented us without our father’s permission, and I’d loved it (I still do; it’s highly worth a rewatch), so I was curious about what Jan De Bont might do next. So you can probably guess why I was geeked when I heard that De Bont was directing a film about tornado chasers, working from a script by Crichton and executive produced by Spielberg. Add in some flying cows, and I was hooked. 

This was the age in which I was pre-sold on movies, eating up every bit of marketing, from trailers to the Entertainment Weekly and Oprah coverage. I asked my mom to pick me up a Twister T-shirt at the Warner Brothers Store that I thought looked cool and I’m sure did not help my social status at all. I remember seeing it opening evening with my best friend Jason at the AMC Abbey 8 in Madison Heights, Michigan; the same theater where I would work as a concessionist the following winter. I was riveted right away, pinned to my seat and blown away by the sheer loudness of the thing. I saw it again at least once more, taking a youth intern at our church to his first trip to a movie theater. I bought the screenplay, Crichton completist that I was. 

And then...nothing. I know we had it on VHS, but I don’t think my infatuation with it expanded long enough for us to ever pick up the DVD (fun fact: Twister was the first film released on DVD). I have no memory of stopping to watch it on TV or renting it from the video store. The closest I can recall is seeing it play in our electronics section at the Sam’s Club where I worked in college, because it was used to demo the sound systems. This movie I went absolutely nuts for and that kicked off a giant summer absolutely evaporated from my mind; I probably thought more about the Twister show at Universal Studios Florida (which I never got to experience) than the movie itself. And over time, I bought into the narrative that it was the epitome of big, stupid and empty CGI spectacles, more interested in computer-assisted destruction than in telling a coherent story, and proof  that you could pack a theater without needing to give the audience any well-rounded characters. 

Revisiting it, I think that’s still partly true. Twister isn’t a smart movie, even as much as Crichton’s obsession with technobabble would like you to think it is. Sure, there’s some fun meteorological slang (“goin’ green,” “the cone is silent,” lots of talk about the Fujita Scale) and some shiny computer equipment. But it’s also a movie where people spend half the time driving toward tornados before deciding they need to run away from them. It’s a movie where the storms conveniently increase in severity as the plot dictates, and we’re cheering on a team of researchers that wants to put hundreds of metal spheres into a tornado which, correct me if I’m wrong, is basically like adding shrapnel to it. 

The fact that I saw Twister last playing on display models at Sam’s Club is fitting. It’s definitely a demo movie, the type of film you play to show off the thump of your speakers or the crystal-clear definition of your big screen. The film’s plot is nonsensical because it doesn’t have to do anything other than guide its characters from one giant set piece to another. It’s no wonder it became a theme park attraction; that’s its ultimate aspiration. Its plot is a spectacle delivery system; its characters merely tools to get us close to computer-generated tornadoes and special effects windstorms. 

And you know what? As a stunt spectacular, it still mostly works. 

In the nineties, every one of these big blockbusters was accompanied with discussions about how advanced the CGI had become, and how technology was making anything possible. In the lead up to its release, when people talked about Twister, they talked about how the computer effects made the tornados look so real or how De Bont and his collaborators destroyed an entire farm house with pixels. Watching it today, it’s apparent how in its infancy CGI was. That farm rips apart like something from a video game, and it’s easy to see the seams in some of the wispier tornadoes. 

But the limited capabilities of CGI at that time meant that there was still a lot that had to be accomplished in camera and, ironically, that’s the stuff that still works really well with Twister today. De Bont ratchets up the suspense, and some of the scenes are still fairly intense. Yeah, that flying cow looks silly now, but you can almost feel the hail pelting that pick up truck. The CGI tanker explosion hasn’t aged well, but when Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt are navigating falling tractors, which were really being dropped around them, it’s still perfectly thrilling. The sequence where a tornado rips through a drive-in theater and forces the characters to take shelter in a mechanic’s pit is still plenty terrifying, and when the heroes drive through an entire house, you can tell they really plowed through a set, with timber and furniture flying around. De Bont and editor Micahel Kahn know how to tweak the intensity, and they play right from the Spielberg handbook in making the ordinary terrifying. It never quite gets as nerve-wracking as Speed, but it’s still a nifty little ride. 

I’m curious how this movie plays for people who grew up outside the Midwest or plains areas. I’m guessing the spectacle still mostly works, but if you grew up with the anxiety of tornado warnings every time it thundered, there must be a primal pull that gives the film further resonance. De Bont has a lot of scenes with people standing by roadsides or out on the plains, watching clouds roll in and wind pick up. There’s an eerie atmosphere even in the rare quiet moments, the tension that danger could erupt any moment. And even though the tornados are the main draw, the film wisely knows that having the characters evade wind for two hours could quickly get dull, and they find new ways to put them into danger, be that golf ball-size hail, picket fences becoming projectiles or staging a rescue in a collapsing house. Twister promised to kick off the summer with spectacle, and it roared into theaters delivering on that promise. 

Which is good, because when the movie quiets down to focus on its characters, it’s a drag. Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt are both actors I like immensely in other things, but centering the film on their cusp-of-divorce couple just leads to a great deal of irritating bickering. Hunt does what she can with it, and she has a loose energy that works really well. But Paxton’s delivery is often flat and wooden, disappointing for an actor who was often a great deal of fun. We know that Jo and Bill are about to get divorced, but we never learn anything about their relationship, why they split apart or why we should care if they fall back in love. We don’t really even know what they see in each other besides the fact that they both like tornados, which doesn’t seem like a solid foundation to build a relationship around. Paxton and Hunt were rumored to be feuding throughout filming, and both were open that making the movie was an often miserable ordeal. Hunt acquits herself well enough, but it’s pretty obvious that Paxton was just soldiering on. But at least he ends up better than poor Jamie Gertz, who gives it her all but is woefully underwritten as Bill’s new fiancee, who spends most of the film yelling about being caught in tornadoes or being the butt of jokes because of her job as a sex therapist. She deserved better. 

I’d call the majority of the supporting ensemble one-note, but I feel like that might not be fair to the note. We learn nothing about them throughout the movie other than one of them (Alan Ruck) is okay with maps. Another (Jeremy Davies) is a tornado chaser who is apparently terrified of tornadoes, which I think would be a detriment. There’s a guy who talks mainly in movie quotes and a few who just stand around looking appropriately geeky. Cary Elwes picks up a check as the rival scientist who’s “just in it for the money,” which sounds villainous until you realize that chasing funding for more effective research is what good scientists do. 

The exception, of course, is Phillip Seymour Hoffman as the wild Dusty. While there doesn’t appear to be much of a character on the page for Dusty, Hoffman makes a meal out of every scene, and he’s genuinely funny and effective. The energy that would propel him to become one of the greatest actors of the last 20 years is apparent even in this early performance. Hoffman was such a great actor and so known for both his quiet and his intensity that it’s easy to forget he could also be very funny when needed. This in no way goes down as one of his great performances, but he does command the screen every time he’s on, even when he’s opposite giant tornadoes. 

So no, the characters aren’t particularly great. But the cast is solid enough that there’s a shaggy, amiable charm to the movie. And it’s refreshing to see a big-budget blockbuster that is content simply to show up, put its characters through the paces and then cut out as soon as the threat is gone. Twenty-five years ago, they weren’t planting the seeds for sequels and mythologies in these movies, and Twister manages to get in, take the audience on a ride, and get back out in under two hours. This was a giant movie in 1996; today, it almost feels quaint. It would be a Netflix or Amazon film today, not the film that opened up the summer season. 

It’s odd that Twister never spawned a sequel, although I guess I’m not really sure what a Twister 2 would look like. Tornados are tornadoes. I guess you could have taken them to a new setting, maybe a city. Who knows. Maybe they just needed to add sharks. 

So, 25 years on, do I still feel like Twister is a pulse-pounding, white-knuckled ride (the type of review I probably would have written at that point?). Not really. But it works. It’s fun and entertaining, and has a ragged charm that makes it likable even when it’s not firing on all cylinders. Its actors went on to better things; Paxton remained a reliable character actor until his death in 2017 (he was also a capable director; Frailty is an oft-overlooked gem). Hunt went on to win the Oscar a year later for As Good as it Gets; she’s been more low-profile in recent years, but was really solid in the 2012 film The Sessions. Hoffman, of course, went onto a masterful acting career until his death in 2014. 

I wish De Bont had gone on to a more successful career. He never topped Speed, and this was probably his second-best film. The year after Twister, he delivered the notorious Speed 2, before doing The Haunting and a Tomb Raider sequel. He occasionally produces or serves as a cinematographer (where he started, most notably, with Die Hard). But he was a director who I wanted to see continue to deliver big, fun rides. But I guess we’ll always have Speed and Twister.