In Over & Overs we ask Team Experience to share movies that they've seen countless times and tell us why.
by Tony Ruggio
As a kid growing up in Texas, with family in Oklahoma and Nebraska, I had a morbid fascination with tornadoes and the would-be thrill of storm chasing. My fascination was outweighed only by the sheer fear of death. The possibility of finding yourself at the mercy of mother nature was all too real in Tornado Alley, at least for a nine year-old. In the summer of 1996 in air-conditioned theaters an entire country (and myself) learned about the Fujita scale, from itty-bitty F1 tornadoes to mile-wide F5 monsters. Twister was a multiplex phenomenon and the first disaster film in decades to strike hot at the box office. With mixed reviews and Independence Day casting a big shadow, it was then somewhat forgotten...until cable came to the rescue.
Twister is simply one of those movies. More than twenty years later, it’s still on cable at least once a week on a Sunday night or Saturday afternoon. It’s dumber than hell, but more fun than it has any right to be.
It’s the quintessential 90s blockbuster, the sort of dumb fun that makes you wonder what happened to director Jan De Bont, the maestro behind Speed and this movie, the first time modern VFX were used to imitate weather on the grandest scale. With future Oscar winners Helen Hunt and Phillip Seymour Hoffman, not to mention a charming lead performance from the late Bill Paxton and a sniveling heel turn by former Princess Bride Cary Elwes, the cast of Twister is a combination of one-time 80s icons and actors before they were really famous.
Twister is a testament to the early days of CGI. Much of the Oscar-nominated visual effects work holds up to this day, putting to shame the inconsistency of bigger-scale blockbusters like San Andreas, the result of modern production encumbered by too many shots and too little time. There’s a visceral quality to the action, a willingness to allow silence and creakiness to induce fear. Watching Twister you realize how vulnerable our everyday way of life might be when 230-mile-per-hour winds are bearing down on it. The Oscar-nominated sound team’s emphasis on the noise of nails rattling or brick and mortar tearing apart is a message to all: our buildings and ourselves won’t hold in the face of “God’s finger.”
the famous flying cow shot
Intentionally or not, Twister’s script reads differently today. Be it via Paxton’s southern wariness or Hunt’s trauma-induced anxieties, their characters often exclaim something to the effect of “we’ve never seen anything like this before!” There’s a sense of escalation permeating the film, the idea that storm chasers and weathermen are up against increasingly volatile situations.
Sure enough, the weather is getting worse. Storms are more intense, tornadoes are more common cross-country, and maybe now's the right time for a sequel doubling down on the impending doom of it all, our changing climate. In the meantime, you can count on Twister on television every month for the rest of your life. Most of the time it’s a good time.