For decades, I’ve heard moviegoers dismiss blockbusters as nothing more than excuses for elaborate visual effects. Most of the time, that’s hyperbole. In the case of Twister, it is 100 percent true.
As detailed in this 2020 feature in The Ringer, Twister did not begin its life as a story about daredevil storm chasers. Director Jan de Bont didn’t grow up as a boy in Netherlands dreaming of the day when he could capture the majesty and terror of tornados onscreen. The whole film started when Steven Spielberg wondered in the mid-1990s if computer effects had progressed to the point that they could make a convincing CGI tornado.
He commissioned the effects wizards at George Lucas’ Industrial Light & Magic to shoot a test. At the time, “the company had never attempted anything like replicating a force of nature.” Their proof of concept was so convincing that numerous studios immediately wanted to back the film — even though there was no film. There was just a test reel of a tornado throwing farm equipment at a truck.
“The minute we took that shot into the studio and they saw it, they said, ‘Done. We want to make it,’” said Twister producer Kathleen Kennedy in 2015. “We didn’t even have a script yet!”
This does not sound like the origin story of a cinematic classic. But Twister was an immediate hit upon its release in the summer of 1996. It was the second-biggest hit of the year behind only Independence Day. And in the years since it has become a favorite of its era, not to mention a cable television staple with a fanbase loyal enough to earn it a sequel almost 30 years later. Looking at the film today, Twister stands in such stark contrast to the modern breed of big-budget movies, that it’s not hard to see how a movie conceived as a special effects demo reel became a beloved generational favorite.
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Ironically, the film’s total lack of inspiration beyond a Spielberg daydream gives Twister a unique quality that makes it stand out from most modern films of its scale. Today’s summer blockbusters are typically sequels, remakes, or adaptations. They’re based on something or they’re inspired by something. They’re pandering to an audience; they’re playing with an audience’s knowledge of existing source material; they’re tapping into nostalgia — like, say, people’s feelings for the original Twister in 2024.
Twister, on the other hand, is based on nothing. Its co-screenwriter Michael Crichton later said he and collaborator Anne-Marie Martin took their cues from a PBS documentary about tornado chasers and the plot of Howard Hawks’ His Girl Friday, in which a newspaper editor and reporter who used to be husband and wife must put aside their differences to land the crime story of the century. But you don’t need to know anything about either of those films, or about tornados — or literally anything at all — to understand Twister. At a time when so many blockbusters feel like quizzes, when they arrive with homework that are practically prerequisites to proper viewing, Twister remains a film whose entire plot synopsis can be summarized by its one-word title.
If you need more than “twister” to synopsize the plot: Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt star as Bill and Jo, estranged husband and wife storm chasers who collaborated on a new tornado measuring gadget called “Dorothy” but never completed it before they broke up. Bill tracks down Jo one last time to get her to sign their divorce papers so he can start his new life as a humble TV weatherman. He even brings his new fiancée Melissa (Jami Gertz).
Jo is singularly obsessed with tornados, because they took her father’s life when she was a child — a tragic backstory rendered in surprisingly intense detail during Twister’s opening sequence. Hoping to get Bill to help her finally get Dorothy off the ground, she hems and haws and tries not to sign the paperwork. She also shows Bill a working prototype of Dorothy that her team is about to deploy during a flurry of intense storms. Caught up in the excitement of trying to get Dorothy to fly, Bill rejoins the crew, and inevitably reconnects with Jo as the storms swirl around them.
It ain’t Shakespeare, but it is astounding how novel a big-budget movie about grownups with grownup problems (marital strife, needing to get documents signed, tornados destroying your aunt’s house) feels today. Yes, Twister mostly focuses on ILM’s digital tornados, and yes the dialogue rarely rises above the level of single-word exclamations screamed over the sound of wind machines (“Right! Left! Debris!!”) Still, the sheer fact that Twister is about a squabbling couple in a rocky marriage make it look boldly adult in comparison to the simplistic stuff released every week during the summer now.
Bill and Jo don’t just squabble, though; like Hildy Johnson and Walter Burns from His Girl Friday, they clearly still have the hots for each other, another element that makes Twister feel like a product of a bygone (and dare I say superior) era of filmmaking. Modern blockbusters are so sexless, lest they offend someone or limit the film’s potential appeal to every possible age and demographic. Twister is a horny movie. Hunt spends most of the film running through the rain in a thin white tank top. There are unnecessary shower scenes. In practically every sequence, Bill and Jo get tossed into close physical proximity and they do that thing that happens in movies where two people who don’t want to admit they want to make out wind up with their faces really close together and then have to awkwardly separate without swapping spit.
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Note Paxton’s deeply suggestive delivery of the line “I want that” right after he and Hunt almost kiss. He’s talking about a plate of home-cooked food. But he’s also not talking about food at all. It’s all so shameless … but Hollywood movies have forgotten how much fun it is to be this shameless.
It helps that Twister has actors of Paxton and Hunt’s caliber to sell those lines. Neither were huge names when they were cast as the film’s leads; Paxton was a perennial supporting player and Hunt was known as one-half of the central couple on the sitcom Mad About You. The true stars here were the tornados themselves, which dwarfed Paxton and Hunt on the film’s theatrical poster, and to a lesser extent Spielberg and Crichton reuniting after the success of Jurassic Park and the hit TV drama ER. Twister’s marketing also heavily promoted that it came from de Bont, the director of Speed, which became a surprise smash two summers earlier with a similar formula of attractive B-listers with simmering sexual tension, an ingenious high concept, and top-notch effects and practical stunts.
With Spielberg, Crichton, de Bont, and ILM’s wizardry as the primary draws, Twister was free to surround Paxton and Hunt with a great cast of supporting players. Cary Elwes, who’d already made a name for himself in comedies like The Princess Bride, Hot Shots!, and Robin Hood: Men in Tights, played the main non-meteorological villain, a rival storm chaser named Jonas. Veteran character actress Lois Smith turned up for the key role of Jo’s Aunt Meg. Jo and Bill’s team included such familiar faces and future stars as Jeremy Davies, Todd Field, Alan Ruck, and a young Philip Seymour Hoffman, who steals most of the movie through sheer youthful enthusiasm for every single thing that occurs onscreen.
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All of these elements add up to a canny formula: Good actors, and impressive special effects from ILM. Some of the twisters look a bit less convincing than they did in 1996, but having seen this movie in the theater, I can personally confirm: Back in the day, Twister packed a punch on the big screen.
And yet, I didn’t love Twister when I saw it in 1996, and I don’t particularly love it today. Paxton and Hunt’s banter, and the endless parade of thunderstorms, do get a little wearisome and repetitive. (Also for all the supposed sexual tension between the characters, the actors supposedly had way more actual tension off camera.) Even with that amazing cast, Twister does feel like a film conceived as a showcase for emerging effects technology first. It contains memorable moments, but this is one of those films that’s like a glossed-up B-picture, both in terms of the type of film and its quality.
Regardless, I totally understand why many people love Twister, especially today. It doesn’t look or sound like the kinds of blockbusters we get anymore. Even if Twister isn’t quite a classic, we could absolutely use more movies like it — perhaps with a bit more emphasis on the story, and less on the particle physics.
