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Twister

Twister (1996)

May. 10,1996
|
6.5
|
PG-13
| Adventure Drama Action

An unprecedented series of violent tornadoes is sweeping across Oklahoma. Tornado chasers, headed by Dr. Jo Harding, attempt to release a groundbreaking device that will allow them to track them and create a more advanced warning system. They are joined by Jo's soon to be ex-husband Bill, a former tornado chaser himself, and his girlfriend Melissa.

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Reviews

Lightdeossk
1996/05/10

Captivating movie !

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Sexyloutak
1996/05/11

Absolutely the worst movie.

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TrueHello
1996/05/12

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

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Zlatica
1996/05/13

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

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jaredpahl
1996/05/14

On the surface, Twister looks like any other 90s summer blockbuster. It comes from a time when the big summer tentpoles could draw millions with nothing but state-of-the-art special effects, likeable movie stars, and great marketing. Unlike most 90s box-office smashes however, Twister took this formula literally. Twister is nothing but actors and effects. And yet somehow, despite not having any story to speak of, despite not having a single coherent character arc, and despite not having an actual beginning, middle, or end, Twister is, against all odds, pretty enjoyable.Twister is about a team of storm chasers, including ones played by Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt. There is your plot summary. Yes there are evil storm chasers and ex-wives and stuff, but I must reiterate; Nothing actually happens in Twister. Well, nothing beyond storms and people chasing them. It is almost shocking how simplistic a film Twister is. It begins with a tornado, and keeps throwing tornadoes at the screen until the audience has got their fill. The script was written in part by Michael Crichton, my favorite author, and I prefer to imagine the final result is not his fault. Maybe I'm right, seeing as the elements associated with Crichton: the science of storm chasing and the professional love triangle, are simply along for the ride in a script that goes as follows: Storm happens, characters chase storm, characters rest, storm happens again, and repeat.But remember, Twister is enjoyable. Attribute that to those ever-present storms. Tornadoes have never looked cooler. The special effects from ILM were top of the line in 1996, and they still look remarkable. Tornadoes on land, tornadoes on water, tornadoes in the town, tornadoes in the fields, they all look like the real deal. They're massive, frightening, and spectacular in the truest sense of the word; they are a spectacle to see. It's all fun, of course, and director Jan de Bont doesn't hold back. You get your money's worth out of the action in Twister. Things may get repetitive after the fifth tornado pops up, but hey, nobody can claim that there aren't enough set-pieces. And de Bont stages the scenes well. We've seen plenty of CGI disaster flicks, but few of them have captured the thrill of being inside a powerful force of nature the way Twister does.There throughout all the mayhem are Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt, two strong movie personalities, whose enthusiasm for the storm chasing material carries the picture. Let's face it, they don't do much acting here, but they are easy to get along with on screen. For two people asked to hold our hands through a parade of extreme weather, you'd be hard pressed to find better. Phillip Seymour Hoffman also has a small but colorful role as another storm lover, and he provides some needed humor. The cast sells their characters' passion for science, and it almost becomes infectious.Twister is little more than a special effects demo reel. I'm serious. It allots virtually no time to story or characters, relying instead on a series of regularly scheduled tornadoes to stand in for a plot. The effects are great, and the characters around them are livelier than most, but I won't pretend like the movie doesn't flat out ignore some key elements. Twister is not very good, but by disaster movie standards, it is more effective than most. Its twisters are impeccably realized through some impressive CGI, and they are thrilling to behold. In some ways, I admire the decision to focus solely on the tornadoes. Sure, it runs the risk of getting stale, but at least nobody leaves Twister asking "Where were the storms?!"67/100

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Hitchcoc
1996/05/15

Come on! Yes, I know I'm taking it too seriously. Someone said something about expecting too much when it's all about the special effects and lots of exploding houses. That's fine if that's your thing. What I don't buy is that the people who made the film didn't bother to research how tornadoes behave. Did any of them have a clue what the things can do. For people to be holding on to something for dear life (literally) while one of these massive things comes through is so stupid I can't believe it. There is no more devastating natural event in a small space than a tornado. No person is going to withstand it by grabbing on to something as it goes by. Also, like the shark in Jaws, the tornadoes in this movie seem to be chasing after the main characters. They are low pressure pockets that create enormous winds. They have not motives in mind. But I guess if you don't really care if there is a semblance of reality, go for it. There were some good scenes during the storm chaser parts at the beginning, but that was eventually forgotten.

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ThiefOfStars
1996/05/16

Bill Paxton plays Bill Harding, a former storm chaser who travels to the heart of tornado alley with his fiancée, Melissa, during an unusually high outbreak of storms to retrieve divorce papers from his storm chasing, soon-to-be ex wife, Jo (Helen Hunt).Jo, who still has feelings for her estranged husband, reveals that she has brought Bill's design for an internal tornado reading device, 'Dorothy', to fruition. Lured by the chance to see Dorothy in action for the first time, Bill agrees to join Jo and the team one final time.Unfortunately, an inept but arrogant rival team of storm chasers have copied Bill's design and developed a tornado reading device of their own called 'D.O.T.', and Bill and Jo must get Dorothy into the air before they have a chance.The rest of the movie that follows is basically Bill and Jo realising their true feelings for one another interspersed with scenes of tornadoes that appear and disappear conveniently according to the plot.This movie is a huge guilty pleasure of mine. Going by my own personal rating system this movie should be a '5', which is an essentially 'bad' movie with good elements that make it worth a watch, but I bumped it up to '6' for two reasons; as an avid sky watcher (seriously, I should have just gone into meteorology for the amount of time I spend looking upwards) there is a real dearth of good extreme weather movies out there and as long as you aren't concerned with complex characters or plot then Twister delivers in that respect. Yes, the science is implausible and downright silly at times, but it's still the best extreme weather movie to date.The second reason is for the end credit sequence featuring Van Halen's instrumental piece, 'Respect the Wind'. I've bumped up many a mediocre movie before due to their soundtracks and I feel 'Respect the Wind' captures the wild, majestic, unbridled nature of planet Earth's skies perfectly and beautifully.

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Carl (carlroose)
1996/05/17

Twister is a classic storm-related movie that is known for its special effects depicting the intensity and power of tornadoes. The main characters in the movie, Jo and Bill, are having your typical pre-divorce drama throughout the film. The cliché twist of this 1996 film is that the disasters they experience throughout the movie actually mend their relationship. Their passion for storm-chasing reunites them and Bill doesn't take long to forget about his less intense fiancée Melissa. The main goal of the characters in the film is to use their invention DOROTHY to release thousands of small sensors into a tornado passing by. The sensors will hopefully provide Bill and Jo and the rest of the world with much-needed information on these sudden natural disasters that can help with the creation of better storm warning systems. After much trial and error, the two finally successfully use DOROTHY and the movie comes to a close. This movie successfully allows us to take a glimpse into the lives of storm chasers by providing us with an accurate-enough view of monitoring equipment that news stations attach to vans to read pressure, temperature, wind speed, etc. The coolest part of the film is that the main instrument DOROTHY is actually based off the real- world instrument TOTO, which stands for Totable Tornado Observatory. TOTO is a barrel-shaped instrument similar to the copy in the film that was created in 1979 with the hopes that it would record valuable data on a tornado's structure. Unlike the movie, there was never a successful deployment of this device as it was knocked down by even the weakest tornados. The device was also used more successfully in measuring wind fronts from thunderstorms until its retirement in 1987. Safety issues deploying such a large device near active storms made the device illogical to use. The movie had some other faults that shouldn't be recreated in real life. It mentions that a green sky always indicates a tornado, but this isn't exactly the case. The two phenomena just go together often since green skies occur when light scatters through raindrops during extremely heavy storm events. The film also had quite a lot of tornados throughout, with each one the characters came across being bigger than the last. Tornado event don't typically occur like that, but instead happen all of a sudden and then tire out just as quickly after their path of destruction comes to an end. Overall, the film is mostly fun with a little true science here and there.

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