1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 53: Twister
I’m watching YouTube videos with Samuel. His request: “Some tornadoes in Nebraska.”
That’s my boy.
The best scene in The Wizard of Oz is the tornado scene. Same goes for Dr. T and the Women. That tornado scene turns into a birthing scene: Richard Gere falls out of the sky, wakes up in the desert, staggers into a peasant’s hut, and helps to deliver a child. My favorite, though, is the “tornadoes over Los Angeles” scene in The Day After Tomorrow.
Those movies have many things going for them, but that’s beside the point. As long as your special effects are adequate, your tornado movie will be awesome. That’s just a consequence of what it is to be a tornado.
You can make your tornadoes as realistic or as surrealistic as you like: tornadoes are ordinary and bizarre. You can have lousy actors. You can have a lousy story. You can have a tornado full of sharks. (No, I haven’t seen that movie.) The tornado itself will cover a multitude of sins.
Twister, mercifully, has lots and lots of scenes with tornadoes.
Its “human interest” story is pretty dumb. Roger Ebert describes it:
The domestic-strife-in-a-tornado theme would be detailed with infinitely greater sensitivity a year later, in an episode of King of the Hill.
Again, all of this is beside the point. This movie has tornadoes; and not in a coy way, the way Jaws has a shark but overwhelmingly consists of people waiting around for the shark. (Take Shelter might be the best tornado movie in that vein. If the people in Jaws are like, “We’re gonna need a bigger boat,” the guy in Take Shelter is like, “We’re gonna need a better storm cellar.”) The tornadoes in Twister are visible and plentiful, and they get better as the movie goes along. I confess, the first few tornadoes underwhelmed me, but the last two or three made the viewing worthwhile. Gene Siskel famously said: “I always ask myself, ‘Is the movie that I am watching as interesting as a documentary of the same actors having lunch together?’” In the case of Twister, a better question might be: Is this movie as interesting as a documentary about the same tornadoes? The answer is: Alas, probably not. All the YouTube videos in this entry are more interesting than Twister. But that doesn’t mean Twister isn’t awesome. It has a plethora of tornadoes. And it has lots of good location filming (in Oklahoma, mostly), and breathtaking skies.
P.S. I told Samuel the movie might be scary, so he stayed at the top of the stairs and listened but didn’t watch. He kept saying, “Oh my goodness! Oh my gracious!”
That’s my boy.
The best scene in The Wizard of Oz is the tornado scene. Same goes for Dr. T and the Women. That tornado scene turns into a birthing scene: Richard Gere falls out of the sky, wakes up in the desert, staggers into a peasant’s hut, and helps to deliver a child. My favorite, though, is the “tornadoes over Los Angeles” scene in The Day After Tomorrow.
Those movies have many things going for them, but that’s beside the point. As long as your special effects are adequate, your tornado movie will be awesome. That’s just a consequence of what it is to be a tornado.
You can make your tornadoes as realistic or as surrealistic as you like: tornadoes are ordinary and bizarre. You can have lousy actors. You can have a lousy story. You can have a tornado full of sharks. (No, I haven’t seen that movie.) The tornado itself will cover a multitude of sins.
Twister, mercifully, has lots and lots of scenes with tornadoes.
Its “human interest” story is pretty dumb. Roger Ebert describes it:
Melissa is not happy. One minute she’s engaged to handsome young Bill Harding, who has a promising career as a TV weatherman ahead of him. The next minute, she’s cowering in a pickup truck while tornadoes blow houses at her. And Bill can’t wait to find another tornado. “When you told me you wanted to chase tornadoes,” she tells him, “I thought that was a metaphor.” It is a metaphor, Melissa, but not for Bill’s dream. It’s a metaphor for Twister, a movie that chases tornadoes with such single-minded dedication that plot, character, dialogue and even your engagement all disappear into the Suck Zone – which is, we learn, that part of the tornado that sucks up everything in its path. By the end of the film, we have seen trees, TV towers, drive-in theaters, trucks, houses, barns and even cows sucked up by the Zone. Well, maybe only one cow. “I think it’s the same one, coming past again,” Bill tells Jo.I feel sorry for Melissa (Jami Gertz), the only sane person in the movie. If I had to be married to Melissa or to Jo (Helen Hunt), I’d choose Melissa. Bill Harding (Bill Paxton) wants to choose Melissa but can’t. Jo’s got him sucked in, chasing after her dream, which is a death wish. (There are better death-wish movies from 1996: Maborosi; Normal Life.) When Jo was a little girl, she had to watch a tornado suck her dad out of a storm cellar. It screwed her up real good.
The domestic-strife-in-a-tornado theme would be detailed with infinitely greater sensitivity a year later, in an episode of King of the Hill.
Again, all of this is beside the point. This movie has tornadoes; and not in a coy way, the way Jaws has a shark but overwhelmingly consists of people waiting around for the shark. (Take Shelter might be the best tornado movie in that vein. If the people in Jaws are like, “We’re gonna need a bigger boat,” the guy in Take Shelter is like, “We’re gonna need a better storm cellar.”) The tornadoes in Twister are visible and plentiful, and they get better as the movie goes along. I confess, the first few tornadoes underwhelmed me, but the last two or three made the viewing worthwhile. Gene Siskel famously said: “I always ask myself, ‘Is the movie that I am watching as interesting as a documentary of the same actors having lunch together?’” In the case of Twister, a better question might be: Is this movie as interesting as a documentary about the same tornadoes? The answer is: Alas, probably not. All the YouTube videos in this entry are more interesting than Twister. But that doesn’t mean Twister isn’t awesome. It has a plethora of tornadoes. And it has lots of good location filming (in Oklahoma, mostly), and breathtaking skies.
P.S. I told Samuel the movie might be scary, so he stayed at the top of the stairs and listened but didn’t watch. He kept saying, “Oh my goodness! Oh my gracious!”