Director – Jan de Bont – 1996 – US – Cert. PG – 108m
Film **
Special Effects (the twisters themselves) *****
1996 review for long defunct website London Calling Internet
A twister, as lovers of The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939) will know, is a tornado that snatches up objects in its path into the air and then dumps them down again. The one that snatched Dorothy into the air was a cheap special effect in a wonderful film. The current movie, on the other hand, is the other way round: basically, it’s a rotten movie with awe-inspiring special effects. The cast here is not so much the workmanlike group of American actors playing uninspired characters as the incredible series of tornadoes which appear one after another, each seemingly darker and by inference more evil than its predecessor.
This may also be one of those rare movies that requires a big (cinema) screen, with all the resolution that a projected celluloid image can give these tornadoes, to really work its magic.
Approaching Twister with the usual criteria, it fails abysmally. The feeble plot, such as it is, concerns Bill Paxton and ex-wife Helen Hunt coming together, leaving the former’s wife-to-be Jami Gertz out in the cold. The excuse for this dreary excursion is that the first two characters are professional twister chasers. Forget all this (and believe me, when you’re in the middle of some of the scenes with actors and no special effects, you’ll wish the producers had done exactly that) and instead look at the tornadoes themselves. Taken that way, the film works far better.
(Edit: Re-reading this old review in 2024 prior to watching Twisters (Lee Isaac Chung, 2024), I took my own advice and fast-forwarded through the non-twister, human interest bits. This hacks the movie down to about an hour in length and proves a magnificent viewing experience.)
From the opening which pulls a father out of an underground shelter before the eyes of his horrified wife and child, through the extraordinary mangling of a drive-in screen showing The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980), to the dark devourer of a farmhouse in the final reel, the twisters themselves are awesome. You constantly want to rewatch these bits over and over and freeze-frame them.
Marginally interesting Wizard of Oz subtextual stuff about a machine called Dorothy designed to be sucked up inside tornadoes pales beside the sheer spectacle of cows, cars, oil tankers, trees and houses whisked up into the air and dropped back down again, or monstrous columns of malevolent energy migrating wilfully towards camera.
The film also stars Cary Elwes and Philip Seymour Hoffman. However, the CG tornadoes and accompanying special effects are the real stars.
Originally published in 1996 on London Calling Internet. Heavily edited and rewritten in 2024.
Trailer (2024 4K UHD Blu-ray release):