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.… Read the rest