Mark Harrison | On 11, Dec 2021

Director: Jan de Bont
Cast: Helen Hunt, Bill Paxton, Jami Gertz, Cary Elwes, Philip Seymour Hoffman
Certificate: PG

Amid a global climate crisis and increasingly frequent instances of storms hammering the UK, a movie about bad weather might not seem like an ideal watch. But when said bad-weather movie is Twister, you may find it sneaks up on you and, without warning, is totally endearing and entertaining.

Co-financed by Warner Bros and Universal, this is one of those big tentpole disaster movies that became very popular in the latter half of the 1990s, but it’s also by far the most characterful of the bunch, tracking a motley bunch of weather researchers across the middle of the United States during a spate of violent tornados.

While Jo Thornton (Helen Hunt) is obsessed with developing technology to provide earlier warnings of extreme weather events, her ex-husband and fellow storm-chaser Bill (Bill Paxton) is trying to get her to sign divorce papers so he can remarry. After tracking her down in Oklahoma, he’s whisked away on a breakneck journey to test their storm-predicting invention, Dorothy, under extreme conditions.

Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment produced the film, and Spielberg, Robert Zemeckis, and James Cameron were all considered to direct before Jan de Bont, fresh off a bad experience developing the movie that would become 1998’s Godzilla came on board. He must have got that out of his system here because this is essentially a monster movie where the monster is weather – or, if you prefer, a feature-length car chase in which the twisters are both pursued and in pursuit.

On top of that, it’s a mad revenge movie about a woman chasing a category of storm that kills her dad in the film’s prologue. And, most of all, it’s a gender-flipped His Girl Friday, with Jo not-so-sneakily enticing Bill into one last escapade before he gets married to his new partner. Hunt and Paxton are marvellous in this regard and, for all the special effects, their breezy chemistry is the main attraction here.

The script is credited to Michael Crichton and his wife, Anne-Marie Martin. Even though they copped a cool $2.5 million to write the film, that didn’t include all the script doctoring by Joss Whedon, Steve Zaillian and Jeff Nathanson, before and during production.

Structurally, it’s really just tornado-happy episodic action, moving from one place to another and either deliberately or accidentally winding up in the thick of it. But the updraft and downdraft of all those different writers gets things moving, and the weird and wonderful ensemble brings it up to full power.

Around the sparky central couple, there’s a likeable gang of storm-chasers, headed up by Philip Seymour Hoffman in an early role as Dusty, as well as a rival team led by Cary Elwes’ hiss-worthy Jonas, who’s usually a day late but never short of a dollar next to Bill and Jo. Even Jami Gertz’s Melissa, the put-upon fiancée to whom the more knowledgeable characters can exposit about storm-chasing for the audience’s benefit, is more likeable and rounded than the film strictly needs her to be.

Twister is the textbook example of great actors elevating OK material – without those grounded characters, this is just another of those 90s disaster movies. The visual effects have held up better than most, but not nearly so well as the memorable characters and sparky dialogue that make this such a treat.

Next Time on The 90s On Netflix…

“The fastest hands in the East versus the biggest mouth in the West.”

 

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