A Life Through Film #020: Twister

The 1996 summer blockbuster season begins with a whirl

Release Date: 5/10/1996

Weeks at Number One: 2

Thanks for reading! This is my ongoing series where I track the evolution of American culture in my life by reviewing every number one film at the weekend box office since I was born in chronological order. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend reading my introduction post here, and be sure to like and share the review if you enjoyed it!

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Now that I live outside of California, I’ve learned a lot about outside perception of the Golden State from non ‘fornians. For one, it turns out not everyone loves the Warriors. For another, more than a few East Coast natives have solemnly checked in with me on the nature of San Francisco’s total collapse into chaos¹. Most curiously though, I’ve met quite a few people who swear they could never step foot on the West Coast for fear of being caught in an earthquake.

This take has always surprised me. I experienced more than a handful of noticeable quakes in the nearly two decades I spent in California, so I know how jarring they can be. But much of the infrastructure of the state is made to withstand shifting tectonic plates, meaning you’re unlikely to be caught under rubble unless the biggest of big ones hits. I will chalk my feelings on earthquakes up to luck though; most of the time all I managed to feel was a slight rumbling beneath my feet while the sound of picture frames and knick-knacks rocking back and forth came from the nearest bookshelf (which was drilled into the wall, naturally). 

I don’t outright dismiss the people from outside of California who are terrified by the concept of an earthquake though. I get it. If you haven’t experienced something like that, you might look to something like the movies to replicate the phenomenon in a theater or at home. With extreme geological or weather events, this often means disaster movies, which will take them to their most dangerous extremes in the name of popcorn entertainment. If you’ve never been to the West Coast but know about the 1906 or 1989 earthquakes and maybe have seen San Andreas or 2012 [2/5], you’d expect every shifting of the tectonic plates to bring apocalyptic mayhem. 

This logic doesn’t just extend to earthquakes, of course. For example: you will have to do some heavy monetary convincing to get me to spend any extended time in Oklahoma. If there’s one weather phenomenon I truly fear, it’s tornadoes. Not that I’ve ever experienced one in person. But I’ve read about F5s, I’ve seen the blurry video footage, and I’ve watched Twister.

Twister is a 1996 disaster movie starring Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton, and directed by Dutch filmmaker Jan de Bont. As you’ll see, the movie is surprisingly important for a few reasons, and I’ll add one more to the list. Over the course of this column, I’ve written about movies whose inspiration came from books, misery, other films, and, just last week, stoned conversations between creatives. Twister is a first though. Never before have I spent so much time researching and writing about a movie birthed from a tech demo. 

It was the early ‘90s, and Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment was excited by the winds of change. Their 1993 dinosaur hit, Jurassic Park [3.5/5], had shown the awesome potential of CG animation as a tool for special effects, and they were ready to keep making movies that would take those effects to the next level. Interestingly, the studio saw potential in using computer tech to bring back natural disaster movies, which were hugely popular in the ‘70s but ultimately a trend that didn’t make it to the end of that decade. Spielberg and the rest of Amblin’s leadership commissioned legendary effects house Industrial Light and Magic to put together a short demo to see how computers could be used to depict a disaster that the producers felt had never been done proper justice in film: tornados. 

After ten weeks of work, ILM presented their test footage to the suits at Amblin. By using brand new rendering tech, the effects wizards at the company were able to make more realistic tornadoes than had ever been seen on film.

Amblin was blown away (pun intended). The executives were so viscerally excited by the demo that a full movie was greenlit before any script was even dreamt of in order to make use of the technology. The video below has a few SFX breakdowns of some shots that were actually in the final movie, but the test that Twister was essentially reverse engineered from is the first one in the clip. Interestingly, despite featuring in the trailer, the shot was never recreated in the movie itself. Put your mindset back to a simpler time and be amazed: 

Spielberg decided to get Michael Crichton, both the author of the book Jurassic Park and the screenwriter of its adaptation, to pen the script for the new disaster movie. Writing alongside his wife, Anne-Marie Martin, Crichton found inspiration from both a PBS documentary on storm chasers and the classic screwball comedy His Girl Friday [3/5]. He centered the story on a crew of thrill-seeking scientists whose day chasing a tornado outbreak gets more and more dangerous, all the while the married couple at the center of the group try to finalize their divorce. 

The potential directors considered for Twister were either some of the most successful directors of all time (like James Cameron and Tim Burton) or were on their way to that status (like a young Michael Bay, who will feature in this column very soon). Spielberg himself nearly took on the project, but eventually he and the rest of the Amblin producers realized that they knew just the guy for the job. And wouldn’t you know it? He was in between gigs. 

Jan de Bont got his start as a cinematographer in Europe in the 1970s before moving to the U.S. to make it in Hollywood. As the man behind the camera, de Bont worked on some massive hits in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, such as Die Hard [4/5, not a Christmas movie] and The Hunt for Red October [3.5/5]. However, by the start of the ‘90s, the Dane had grown tired of shooting shots for other directors and wanted to helm his own production. At around the same time, John McTiernan, the director of Die Hard and Red October, passed on a movie about a bomb on a bus in Los Angeles. He was more than happy to recommend his old coworker de Bont for the job. 

Jan de Bont’s 1994 directorial debut Speed was a runaway hit (again, pun intended) that made everyone involved very much in demand in the following years [it’s a 4/5]. We’ve tracked the success of that movie’s screenwriter already in my review of Broken Arrow, and the film’s director was similarly given high profile opportunities after its release. Originally, de Bont was slated to direct an American adaptation of Godzilla for TriStar Pictures, a project whose pre-production he passionately threw himself into. However, before any shooting could ever begin, the studio pulled the plug, citing budget concerns and a worry for Americans not getting the appeal of the big lizard (a more studio-aligned version of Godzilla eventually came out in 1998 and will eventually be the subject of this column). 

Frustrated by the experience, de Bont was eager to bounce back and prove himself as a director. After reading Crichton’s script for Twister and watching the ILM test footage, he was fully onboard to direct Amblin’s big disaster film. In order to punch up the dialogue, de Bont brought on a young Joss Whedon to do a zinger pass on the script and add some humanity to it.² From there, director and studio looked to casting.

Fighting the studio’s inclinations towards big stars, de Bont prioritized quality actors who weren’t as well known stars as, say, Tom Hanks. That’s who the studio had in mind for the lead role, but the actor passed on Twister to write and direct his own movie, That Thing You Do. However, he did depart the casting meeting with a tip: why not ask his Apollo 13 [4/5] costar Bill Paxton? Paxton had been a reliable character actor in Hollywood for years at this point, but had never really been a leading man. To de Bont, he was the perfect combination of talent and relatability. 

For the female lead, the director only had eyes for Helen Hunt. The studio warned against this choice, not seeing the potential for a TV actress to make the jump to big budget films (Hunt was one of the stars of sitcom Mad About You at the time). But de Bont wouldn’t be swayed, and eventually the suits at the top gave in. The rest of the cast was filled with quality actors at various stages of their careers: Cary Elwes, Jami Gertz, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Alan Ruck, and plenty of other faces that might ring familiar to you if you’ve seen enough movies over the years. If you like pointing at the screen in recognition of character actors, Twister is the film for you.

Despite shooting on location in Oklahoma and Iowa in the spring of ‘95 in hopes of capturing real tornado footage, de Bont and company happened to be working during a bizarrely calm season for storms.  You’d think that would make things easy on set, and you’d be wrong! In the moment, they still worried that an actual twister could manifest at any moment and put the shoot in serious danger. The team was constantly on the lookout for live tornados in the area that could threaten their safety, and when combined with the high cost of every shot, the tension hung heavy on set like a darkening storm cloud. 

Five weeks into filming, de Bont struck a cameraman for missing a cue. The director of photography and the rest of his crew, the wardrobe department, and the audio team all quit on the spot, prompting a visit from an angry Spielberg who verbally dressed down de Bont to get his shit together. Later, the replacement DP was also injured when a prop malfunctioned, leading to de Bont taking over as both director and cinematographer. The stars also felt the effects of the hard shoot: Paxton and Hunt both dealt with eye and head injuries as a result of the intense filming process. And if that weren’t all enough, filming had to pause again because of the Oklahoma City Bombing in April of ‘95 so that the cast and crew could help with the relief efforts.

Somehow, despite the production budget swelling to nearly $100 million and the set filled with violent tension, injuries, and a plethora of external factors, the team did it. Twister ended up not only done, but on schedule for a big release on Memorial Day Weekend of 1996. Even more bizarrely, the final product lives up to the promise set by that showreel all those years before. 

The best disaster movies balance fear and fun in about equal measure. The tension of the driving catastrophe has to feel believable, but you also have to ensure people have a good time munching on popcorn while watching it at their local AMC. Twister pretty much nails this dynamic. 

The film was made as a technical showcase for Amblin and ILM, and on that front it more than delivers. Like most CG effects, some of the shots of digital tornadoes in the movie don’t quite hold up to modern standards, but a lot of them still look great. These monsters swirl and wreak havoc with the tiniest hint of personality. The twin tornadoes over the reservoir almost near the beginning of the movie feel almost playful, while the F4 that destroys the drive-in theater later feels like a hulking monster actively seeking our destruction. By the time the F5 dominates the finale, the weather event almost feels like an ancient, evil deity.

The effects in Twister would be impressive even if all we got were some good looking cyclones. But on this most recent watch (my third overall), I was truly bowled over by the movie’s color correction and compositing during the special effects shots. The fact that the post-production team were able to take footage of the actors with a jet engine pointed at them on an otherwise lovely day and convincingly place them in the path of a rampaging storm is outrageously impressive. Those shots still holding up nearly 30 years later is nothing short of a miracle. 

The twin cherries on top of this special effects sundae are the sound design and the practical work done on set. Like I said, the actors were blasted with jet engines to simulate the high power winds of a real tornado. Shots were littered with tons and tons of artificial debris made of both rubber and biodegradable material to add tangible believability to scenes. The hail sequence about halfway through the movie was done practically using an ice chipper, every ice block they could get to Oklahoma, and gallons upon gallons of milk. These efforts to make the close up shots look as good as the sweeping wide looks at the CG tornadoes makes Twister a quality effects picture no matter what we’re seeing on screen. 

Of course, the appeal is the towering twisters themselves, and the sound designers on the film understood that perfectly. The terrifying roar of the tornadoes sounds like an angry predator bearing down on you, and that’s before you even learn that that’s not too far off from the truth. Various animal calls were pitched down and overdubbed in the editing bay to create the uniquely intense soundtrack of destruction in Twister, adding to the feeling that maybe, juuust maybe, these disasters have a terrible mind of their own. 

Despite playing second fiddle to their digital tornado co-stars, the human actors do a solid job giving us a reason to care about them as they plunge ever closer to mortal peril. Hunt and Paxton have good chemistry as Jo and Bill respectively, a divorced couple with more than a few sparks left between them. You can tell when they bicker that they’re having the thousandth version of that particular argument, and those occasional yearning looks carry some memory within them.

I go back and forth on whether Paxton’s actually good as an actor in this, and while I don’t necessarily buy him as a leading man, he’s undoubtedly charming. Hunt, meanwhile, shines as the closest thing Twister has to an actual character. Jo’s obsession with studying tornadoes as a way to grapple with the traumatic death of her father in the flashback that starts the movie makes sense, and leads to a genuinely poignant moment at the end. When she’s able to look up in awe into the middle of an F5 tornado, the last thing her father saw before dying, you buy the closure because of Hunt’s performance in the rest of the movie.

The rest of the supporting cast is fine, but is never developed past one or two personality quirks: Philip Seymour Hoffman is the burned out hippie, Elwes is the corporate tool, Ruck is the guy who does maps, stuff like that. As an ensemble it’s fun to watch, but besides maybe Hoffman (who gets all the funniest lines in the film), no one really stands out from the crowd too much. That’s fine though. No one personality can be bigger than the twisters in Twister.

One thing I appreciate in going back to this movie is the scale of its narrative. Many disaster flicks both before and after Twister have been predicated on catastrophes that could leave hundreds of thousands dead at best and destroy the world at worst. What we have here though is a bad burst of tornadoes, none of which threaten to destroy any major population area or pick up dozens of hungry sharks. The quest in Twister isn’t one of prevention or saving the world, but rather of research and understanding. Bill, Jo, and the rest of the gang aren’t superheroes, they’re scientists, and the movie makes the smart choice to focus on that instead of making them stopping an F9 from destroying the country or something. 

The dialog in Twister is filled with technical jargon related to radar, wind patterns, and air pressure. I couldn’t parse a lot of it, but most of the time it just washed over me and let me know that Science was happening. If that kind of writing can get in the way of your enjoyment, I’d recommend you go into Twister with your brain fully off. That said, if you’re in the 5th Grade and just learned about tornadoes in science class, this is the perfect movie to watch if you want to catch some references to your end-of-unit test. But also, if you’re reading this column and eleven-years-old, go outside if you can. What are you doing reading about Twister?

Hunt’s character Jo has a line early on in the movie where she basically says that no one really knows how tornadoes work despite years and years of research. I was ready to call bullshit on that, but to my surprise upon researching it, she wasn’t too far off. Twister came out about a year after the first VORTEX study, a two year government program that used state of the art doppler radar to better understand the physical origins of dangerous tornadoes. The results of that research led to better knowledge of how and when twisters form, which meant earlier warnings to get people out of harm’s way. This matches the actual quest of Twister closely, further grounding the film in reality and keeping the stakes realistic.

My two biggest problems with Twister are very different: one has to do with the movie itself and the other relates to how I watched it. 

The pacing of the film is a bit odd overall. The first act is excellent. It sets up the terrifying power of tornadoes in Jo’s childhood flashback, establishes the dynamics of the main team over a sweet soundtrack of VH1 rock (Mark Knoppfler and KD Lang? Hell yeah!), and shows us two back to back tornado encounters as movie villain Cary Elwes watches on smugly. The second act of the film slows things down far too much in my opinion though, and you begin to realize that a lot of the experience of watching Twister is looking at “exciting” shots of cars driving from one place to another. The lack of Elwes as antagonist for much of this middle section doesn’t help with it feeling meandering overall. 

I might have noticed those issues more this time around because of the circumstances of this watch, however. Unlike the first couple of times I’ve seen Twister, my rewatch for this column was a solo viewing on my laptop monitor. My face being right up against the screen seeing every detail of the effects as subpar sound quality came in through my ear buds made the whole experience much less impressive. This is a big, fun movie, and it deserves to be watched with a group on the biggest screen you have access to. If you do the opposite and watch this on your computer or handheld device, just mentally knock a half star off of my final rating. 

I remain surprised by how well Twister has held up as a whole though, especially as an effects-driven picture. It looks and sounds great, and has just enough of a compelling plot to hook you along from set piece to set piece. It’s not the best blockbuster chock full of destruction to come out in 1996 (we’ll get there, don’t worry), but after a long stretch of movies that were either bad, not very fun, or both to start that year off, it’s a breath of fresh air to see something like Twister. 

Critics at the time were mixed on the film, with it still sitting at 66% on Rotten Tomatoes. One thing the negative and positive reviews could agree on was that Twister felt more like an amusement park ride than a movie; whether that was a good thing or bad thing varied from critic to critic. Personally, I find a well executed effects picture to be as worthwhile as a decent character drama, but I also recognize that I will always carry the part of me that is a 12-year-old boy within my heart forever. Again, your mileage may vary. 

The marketing for Twister went in hard on the visceral nature of the effects, promising the public the terrifying spectacle of being up close and personal with realistic tornados. As shown by the success of movies like Jurassic Park,  Toy Story, and Jumanji, Americans of the mid ‘90s were very into watching the evolving state of computer graphics. With a Spielberg production credit and the director of Speed behind the wheel on top of highly touted CG visuals, how could those who seek thrills at the cineplex not turn out in droves for Twister? 

The financial success of Twister has retroactively reshaped everything I thought I knew about the hit movies of 1996. The movie made over $41 million in its opening weekend, dwarfing the total domestic gross of most of the movies released to that point of the year. No other movie that weekend made even a tenth of what Twister raked in. No other movies may as well have been available. A true F5 of a blockbuster has finally arrived in this column. 

One reason for this success that feels obvious is the release date. Like, of course Memorial Day Weekend is when you launch your big blockbuster. Many people have an extra day off, the weather’s great, and folks are in a good mood. According to a 2020 Yahoo! piece though, Twister was a real gamechanger when it came to kickstarting the summer blockbuster season. Before it, studios would wait until the start of June before pushing out their big budget crowd pleasers.

It’s nice to change how things are done, but the producers weren’t being intentionally revolutionary. Really, the Memorial Day release was more an effort to avoid competing with Mission: Impossible (more on that next week), which was already slated to be the biggest hit of the summer. Twister was predicted to do well, but it ended up doing such bananas numbers that it changed the entire timeframe of the summer movie season.

After dominating for two weekends, Twister stayed in the top ten of the box office for nearly three months. By the time its domestic theatrical run finished up in October (!), it had pulled in nearly $250 million. The film’s international run was just as successful, meaning that despite its swollen $92 million budget, Twister was a massive, half-a-billion-dollar success. By year’s end, it was the second-highest grossing movie of 1996.

And like a rampaging tornado, the financial success only continued. In March of 1997, the first DVD players became commercially available in the U.S. If you were an early adopter and wanted a recent benchmark to test the increased fidelity of the format, you had to look no further than Twister. It was one of the first films released on DVD and ended up being a massive success on home video. In the same way you might see Avatar 2 [3.5/5] used to sell 4k Bluray setups today, this movie almost certainly sold more than a few widescreen TVs and DVD players by the end of ‘90s. 

All of this success was impossible to ignore. Unlike The Craft, which has a tenuous connection to the teen horror explosion that followed it, Twister directly inspired a whole wave of disaster films in the late ‘90s. Many of them will appear in this column, and though not a lot of them will have the restraint of Twister to keep things relatively grounded, they sure will be fun. 

It would have been tough for Twister to disappear from public consciousness with the success that it had, but it isn’t unheard of for films that pioneer new special effects techniques to not have much staying power in our cultural memory. If Twister merely had cool looking tornadoes, that would be one thing. But the team behind the movie nailed the sense of awe and terror that these phenomena cause. The behemoths swirl and dart around, appearing and disappearing seemingly at random to dispense destruction and terror. Fear of the unknown is powerful, and Twister tapped into that fear with aplomb.

That has helped the movie maintain a positive legacy in the years since its release. Many continue to look back on Twister with nostalgia, an admiration that inspired at least one fan to rank every tornado that appears in the film. Earlier this year, the legacy sequel/soft reboot Twisters was released to strong financial success and mixed reviews, mirroring its predecessor. I haven’t seen the new movie yet, but my wife watched it and didn’t care for it outside of seeing Glen Powell star in another movie. I’ll get to it someday. 

The mid 1990s has been a fascinating era to look back on, especially in the shifting tides of movie taste. New stars emerged seemingly weekly, all the while increased use of computer graphics was changing what kinds of movies could even be made. Twister is a bit of the former, with a breakout performance by Helen Hunter, and a whole lot of the latter. As far as cinematic film rides go, you can’t do much better in this era than Twister. Just be sure to watch it on the biggest screen you have access to.

Rating: 4/5

Works Cited

Next Week: I tipped my hand a bit already, but the big hits of 1996 don’t stop. We look at the beginning of a movie empire and finally get to discuss an actor who could reasonably have a claim as one of the main characters of this column. We’re going all the way back to the first Mission: Impossible.

See you then!

-Will

1. Spoiler alert: it actually hasn’t done that.

2. In the month ahead, these kinds of uncredited script contributions will become more and more central to the production story of the movies in this column