Review - Twister (1996)

Picture the scene... It's Thursday afternoon, it's tipping down with rain and you've recently had a fairly successful outing to a few local charity shops and picked up a couple of gems among the usual scratched up copies of The Matrix and carboard covered Steven Seagal movies… Okay maybe that’s just me. In any case, a good go-to easy watch for the dull days is director Jan De Bont’s 1996 epic disaster movie Twister.

The Academy Award nominated film, written by Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton and actress Anne-Marie Martin, centres around a nomadic group of meteorologists led by Jo Thornton (Helen Hunt) and Bill Harding (Bill Paxton) chasing tornadoes at frighteningly brave proximity in order to study them and to help advance tornado warning systems. The crew of scientists are being pursued and intercepted at every turn by the tech-head nightcrawler Jonas Miller (played by the fantastic, not-quite-famous-but-trying Cary Elwes of Saw, Liar Liar, Robin Hood: Men in Tights and Charlie Sheen’s outstandingly funny Top Gun parody, Hot Shots).

The movie’s supporting cast is a veritable cornucopia of future Oscar winners, cult movie favourites and more than a good few “that guy” actors thrown in for good measure. If you've got a sharp eye, you may well recognise the familiar face of a very young Alexa Vega in the opening scene playing a tiny Jo Thornton. Others include Jami Gertz (The Lost Boys, Crossroads), Lois Smith (Minority Report, True Blood), Alan Ruck (Speed, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off), TV’s Sean Whalen, Jake Busey (Contact), Todd Field (Eyes Wide Shut), Joey Stolnik (Hollow Man) and of course, saving the best for last, the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, the filmography of whom I won’t insult my readers’ intelligence or taste by listing.

Jan De Bont’s directorial filmography includes a handful of impressive titles such as Speed (1994), Speed 2 (1997) and the 2003 sequel to 01’s Tomb Raider starring Angelina Jolie. The film features a catchy original score by Mark Marcina (Bad Boys, Con Air) and an exceptional soundtrack of hits by Van Halen, Stevie Nicks & Lindsey Buckingham, Rusted Root, Alison Krauss, Mark Knopfler and The Red Hot Chilli Peppers. Against a production budget of $92m, Twister pulled down an impressive $241.7m in domestic box office revenue and a total of $494m worldwide. The movie received two Academy Award nominations; first in the ‘Best Sound’ category (beaten by The English Patient) and second for ‘Best Visual Effects’, a category which would surely have been in the bag for Jan De Bont’s disaster movie had Ronald Emmerich’s classic extra-terrestrial disaster epic Independence Day not graced our screens that same year.

Twister is a perfect lazy afternoon movie. Aside from a few minor plot holes for artistic licence (the F5 would surely have taken the little red pick-up truck rather than the giant oil tanker), it’s a great watch. The movie is an adrenaline fuelled feel-good classic, reminiscent of countless other films of the same era (they know who they are). If you haven’t seen it, I, for one, recommend it highly!

NTN Score: ****