Twister (1996 film)

For the 1989 film, see Twister (1989 film).

Not to be confused with Twisted (1996 film).

Twister
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Jan de Bont
Written by	Michael Crichton Anne-Marie Martin
Produced by	Ian Bryce Steven Spielberg Michael Crichton Kathleen Kennedy
Starring	Helen Hunt Bill Paxton Jami Gertz Cary Elwes Lois Smith Philip Seymour Hoffman Alan Ruck Zach Grenier
Cinematography	Jack N. Green
Edited by	Michael Kahn
Music by	Mark Mancina Eddie Van Halen
Production company	Amblin Entertainment
Distributed by	Warner Bros. (US) Universal Pictures (International)
Release date	May 10, 1996 (1996-05-10)
Running time	113 minutes
Country	Template:Film US
Language	English
Budget	$92 million
Box office	$494,471,524

Twister is a 1996 American disaster drama film starring Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton as storm chasers researching tornadoes. It was directed by Jan de Bont from a screenplay by Michael Crichton and Anne-Marie Martin. Its executive producers were Steven Spielberg, Walter Parkes, Laurie MacDonald and Gerald R. Molen. Twister was the second-highest grossing film of 1996 domestically, with an estimated 55 million tickets sold in the US.

In the film, a team of storm chasers try to perfect a data-gathering instrument, designed to be released into the funnel of a tornado, while competing with another better-funded team with a similar device during a tornado outbreak across Oklahoma. The plot is a dramatized view of research projects like VORTEX of the NOAA and the device, called Dorothy, is copied from TOTO used in the 1980s by NSSL.

Twister is notable for being both the first Hollywood feature film to be released on DVD format and one of the last to be released on HD DVD. Twister has since been released on Blu-ray disc.

Plot

In June 1969, a family that included a five year-old girl called Jo sought shelter in a storm cellar as a powerful F5 tornado struck. The storm was so strong that the locks on the storm cellar door fail and Jo's father is caught up in the storm and killed. Jo, her mother, and her dog Toby survive.

Years later (current time), Jo (Helen Hunt), now a meteorologist, is reunited with her estranged husband, Bill Harding (Bill Paxton), a former weather researcher and Tough-As-Nails storm chaser who has since become a weather reporter. He is planning to marry sex therapist Melissa Reeves, and arrives at Jo's field station for her signature for the final divorce papers. Jo has built four identical tornado research devices called DOROTHY, based upon Bill's designs. The device is designed to release hundreds of sensors into the center of a tornado to study its structure from the inside; with the purpose of creating a more advanced storm warning system. Bill and Melissa join Jo and her team of storm chasers. The team encounters Dr. Jonas Miller, a smug and sponsored meteorologist and storm chaser. When Bill discovers that Jonas has created a device based on DOROTHY, called "DOT-3," he vows to help Jo deploy DOROTHY before Miller can claim credit for the idea.

Tensions rise between Jo and Bill when they have several dangerous encounters with tornadoes as the team tries unsuccessfully to deploy the new device. During their first tornado, an F1 to F2, Jo's truck is tossed by the tornado as the couple take shelter under a bridge. The truck and DOROTHY I are both destroyed. They continue chasing in Bill's truck, with Melissa in the back seat.

They find a second tornado, a confirmed F2, and head off on a back road when it shifts its track. They soon find themselves driving through heavy rain and before long the same storm drops 3 waterspouts onto a lake. Bill attempts to intercept them on a dam but is caught in the waterspouts, his truck being spun around until the tornadoes dissipate.

Later, after lunch with Jo's aunt Meg's house in Wakita, Oklahoma, the chasers take off after another storm. As they track the storm they learn a "hopping" F0 tornado is on the ground, but they have a little trouble finding it. Approaching a hill they run into a hailstorm, and Jo drives ahead of the chasers to intercept the oncoming tornado. A telephone pole falls on the back of Bill's truck and knocks DOROTHY II out onto the road, disabling it. As the tornado lifts and touches down closer, Bill pulls an obsessed Jo into the truck and backs away to safety. The two confront each other over their marriage and Jo's obsession with stopping tornadoes, due to the death of her father.

That following night, a scary F4 tornado devastates a community in which Bill and Jo's team are staying the night. Melissa, frightened by the dangers of storm chasing and recognizing the unresolved feelings between Jo and Bill, leaves. The tornado moves on and hits Wakita, devastating the community and injuring Meg while destroying her house. After Bill and Jo rescue Meg from her collapsing house, the scientists at NSSL report that an even stronger storm, a monstrous F5, is forming 25 miles south of their position. Upon inspecting Meg's wind chime sculptures, Jo realizes that the most likely method to successfully deploy DOROTHY's sensors into a tornado would be to add additional body surface to catch the wind.

As they reach the F5, the team adds aluminum from Pepsi cans to work as wind flaps, but the deployment of DOROTHY III is a failure. Meanwhile, Jonas attempts to deploy DOT-3, but due to his lack of judgment his truck is caught by the tornado and he and his driver are killed. Jo and Bill set out on their own and in a risky maneuver are able to deploy the last DOROTHY successfully. Their celebration is cut short, however, as the tornado shifts course towards them. They take shelter in a shed where they anchor themselves to irrigation pipes. The tornado destroys the shed and Jo and Bill find themselves in the interior of the massive funnel, before it dissipates.

After the F5 dies out, Jo and Bill find themselves alone, on the floor of the former shed. They then decide to run their own lab, and rekindle their marriage. As the team arrives, they smile at each other and kiss, and the film ends with the teams accomplishment and celebration as the camera zooms out to the end credits of the film.

Cast

• Helen Hunt as Dr. Jo Harding
• Bill Paxton as Bill Harding
• Jami Gertz as Dr. Melissa Reeves
• Cary Elwes as Dr. Jonas Miller
• Philip Seymour Hoffman as Dustin 'Dusty' Davis
• Alan Ruck as Robert "Rabbit" Nurick
• Jeremy Davies as Laurence
• Joey Slotnick as Joey
• Sean Whalen as Alan Sanders
• Todd Field as Tim "Beltzer" Lewis
• Wendle Josepher as Haynes
• Scott Thomson as Jason "Preacher" Rowe
• Lois Smith as Aunt Meg Greene
• Zach Grenier as Eddie
• Alexa Vega as Young Jo
• Richard Lineback as Jo's Father

Production

Twister was a joint production between Warner Bros. and Universal Studios. Both studios had often collaborated with another of the film's production companies, Amblin Entertainment, prior to this film.

The original concept and 10-page tornado-chaser story were presented to Amblin Entertainment in 1992 by motion picture business consultant and award-winning screenwriter Jeffrey Hilton. Spielberg then presented the concept to writer Michael Crichton.

After spending more than half a year on pre-production on Godzilla, director Jan De Bont left after a dispute over the budget and quickly signed on for Twister. The production was plagued with numerous problems. Michael Crichton and his wife, Anne-Marie Martin, were paid a reported $2.5 million to write the screenplay. Joss Whedon was brought in to do rewrites through the early spring of 1995. When he got bronchitis, Steve Zaillian was brought in. Whedon returned and worked on revisions right through the start of shooting in May 1995. He left the project after getting married and two weeks into production, Jeff Nathanson was flown in to the set and worked on the script until principal photography ended.

Halfway through filming both Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt were temporarily blinded by bright electronic lamps used to get the exposure down to make the sky behind the two actors look dark and stormy because it was too bright outside. Paxton remembers that "these things literally sunburned our eyeballs. I got back to my room, I couldn't see". To solve the problem, a Plexiglas filter was placed in front of the beams. The actors took eye drops and wore special glasses for a few days to recuperate. After filming in a ditch that contained bacteria, Hunt and Paxton had to have hepatitis shots. During the same scene, she repeatedly hit her head on a low wooden bridge because she was so exhausted from the demanding shoot that she forgot not to stand up so quickly. Hunt did one stunt in which she opened the door of a vehicle that was speeding through a cornfield, stood up on the passenger side and was hit by the door on the side of her head when she let it go momentarily. As a result, some sources claim that Hunt got a concussion. De Bont said, "I love Helen to death, but you know, she can be also a little bit clumsy." She responded, "Clumsy? The guy burned my retinas, but I'm clumsy ... I thought I was a good sport. I don't know ultimately if Jan chalks me up as that or not, but one would hope so".

Some crew members felt De Bont was "out of control" and left five weeks into filming. The camera crew led by Don Burgess left the production after five weeks, claiming that De Bont "didn't know what he wanted till he saw it. He would shoot one direction, with all the equipment behind the view of the camera, and then he'd want to shoot in the other direction right away and we'd have to move [everything] and he'd get angry that we took too long ... and it was always everybody else's fault, never his". De Bont claims that they had to make schedules for at least three different scenes every day because the weather changed so often that "Don had trouble adjusting to that". When De Bont knocked over a camera assistant who had missed a cue, Burgess and his crew left, much to the shock of the cast. Burgess and his crew stayed on one more week until a replacement was found in Jack N. Green. Just before the end of the shoot, Green was injured when a hydraulic house set, designed to collapse on cue, was mistakenly activated with him inside it. A rigged ceiling hit him in the head and he injured his back and had to go to the hospital. Green missed the last two days of principal photography and De Bont took over as his own director of photography.

De Bont had to shoot many of the film's tornado-chasing scenes in bright sunlight when they could not get overcast skies and asked Industrial Light & Magic to more than double its original plan for 150 "digital sky-replacement" shots. Principal photography had a certain time limit because Hunt had to return to film another season of Mad About You but Paul Reiser was willing to delay it for two-and-a-half weeks when the Twister shoot was extended. De Bont insisted on using multiple cameras and this led to the exposure of 1.3 million feet of raw film (most films use no more than 300,000 feet).

De Bont claims that Twister cost close to $70 million with $2–3 million going to the director. It was speculated that last-minute re-shoots in March and April 1996 (to clarify a scene about Jo as a child) and overtime requirements in post-production and at ILM, raised the budget to $90 million. Warner Bros. moved up the film's release date from May 17 to May 10 in order to give it two weekends before Mission: Impossible opened.

Soundtrack

Twister featured both a traditional orchestral film score (by Mark Mancina) and several rock music songs, including an instrumental theme song composed and performed for the film by Van Halen. Both the rock soundtrack and the orchestral score were released separately on compact disc.

Rock Soundtrack

1. Van Halen - "Humans Being"
2. Rusted Root - "Virtual Reality"
3. Tori Amos - "Talula" (BT's Tornado Mix)
4. Alison Krauss - "Moments Like This"
5. Mark Knopfler - "Darling Pretty"
6. Soul Asylum - "Miss This"
7. Belly - "Broken"
8. k.d. lang - "Love Affair"
9. Lisa Loeb & Nine Stories - "How"
10. Red Hot Chili Peppers - "Melancholy Mechanics"
11. Goo Goo Dolls - "Long Way Down" (Remix)
12. Shania Twain - "No One Needs to Know"
13. Stevie Nicks & Lindsey Buckingham - "Twisted"
14. Edward & Alex Van Halen - "Respect the Wind"

Orchestral Score

1. Oklahoma: Wheatfield
2. Oklahoma: Where's My Truck?
3. Oklahoma: Futility
4. Oklahoma: Downdraft
5. It's Coming: Drive In
6. It's Coming: The Big Suck
7. The Hunt: Going Green (Featuring Trevor Rabin on guitar)
8. The Hunt: Sculptures
9. The Hunt: Cow
10. The Hunt: Ditch
11. The Damage: Wakita
12. Hailstorm Hill: Bob's Road
13. Hailstorm Hill: We're Almost There
14. F5: Dorothy IV
15. F5: Mobile Home
16. F5: God's Finger
17. Other: William Tell Overture/Oklahoma Medley
18. Other: End Title/Respect the Wind - written by Edward and Alex Van Halen

There are some orchestrated tracks that were in the movie but were not released on the orchestral score, most notably the orchestrated intro to Humans Being from when Jo's team left Wakita to chase the Hailstorm Hill tornado. Other, lesser-known tracks omitted include an extended version of "Going Green" (when we first meet Jonas) and a short track from when the first tornado is initially spotted.

Sequel

In December 2010, while doing an interview with Bullz-Eye to promote the new season of HBO's Big Love, Bill Paxton revealed that he had a meeting with film producer Kathleen Kennedy about making a Twister 2. Paxton stated that he would like to direct the sequel if and when it is produced.

Reception

Although criticized in other aspects, Twister was acclaimed for its impressive special effects, resulting in Oscar nominations for both its sound and visuals.

The film was nominated for two Academy Awards for Best Visual Effects and Best Sound (Steve Maslow, Gregg Landaker, Kevin O'Connell and Geoffrey Patterson) in 1997. It also won a Razzie Award in a special category called "Worst Screenplay Grossing Over $100 Million" while Jami Gertz was nominated for Worst Supporting Actress.

Reception to Twister was mixed, with a 59% rating at Rotten Tomatoes, and a weighted mean score of 68 at Metacritic.

Roger Ebert gave the film two and a half stars out of four and wrote, "You want loud, dumb, skillful, escapist entertainment? Twister works. You want to think? Think twice about seeing it". In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, "Somehow Twister stays as uptempo and exuberant as a roller-coaster ride, neatly avoiding the idea of real danger". Entertainment Weekly gave the film a "B" rating and Lisa Schwarzbaum wrote, "Yet the images that linger longest in my memory are those of windswept livestock. And that, in a teacup, sums up everything that's right, and wrong, about this appealingly noisy but ultimately flyaway first blockbuster of summer". In his review for the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan wrote, "But the ringmaster of this circus, the man without whom nothing would be possible, is director De Bont, who now must be considered Hollywood's top action specialist. An expert in making audiences squirm and twist, at making us feel the rush of experience right along with the actors, De Bont choreographs action and suspense so beautifully he makes it seem like a snap". Time magazine's Richard Schickel wrote, "when action is never shown to have deadly or pitiable consequences, it tends toward abstraction. Pretty soon you're not tornado watching, you're special-effects watching". In his review for the Washington Post Desson Howe wrote, "it's a triumph of technology over storytelling and the actors' craft. Characters exist merely to tell a couple of jokes, cower in fear of downdrafts and otherwise kill time between tornadoes".

The film was also criticized for being part of a trend among projectionists to present films with excessively loud audio. It is rumored that Warner Bros. included a note from de Bont himself in the metal containers the reels were delivered in, urging projectionists to present Twister at higher than normal volume.

Urban legend

On May 24, 1996, a tornado destroyed a drive-in theater in Niagara Falls, Ontario which was scheduled to show the movie Twister in a real-life parallel to a scene in the film in which a tornado destroys a drive-in during a showing of the film The Shining. The facts of this incident were exaggerated into an urban legend that the theater was actually playing Twister during the tornado.

On May 10, 2010, a tornado struck Fairfax, Oklahoma, destroying the farmhouse where numerous scenes in Twister were shot. J. Berry Harrison, the owner of the home and a former Oklahoma state senator, commented that the tornado appeared eerily similar to the fictitious one in the film. Harrison had lived in the home since 1978.

Theme park attraction

Main article: Twister...Ride it Out

The film was used as the basis for the attraction Twister...Ride It Out at Universal Studios Florida, which features filmed introductions by Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton.

See Also

• 1999 Oklahoma tornado outbreak

External links

• Official site for the film
• Twister at IMDb
• Twister at AllMovie
• Twister at Rotten Tomatoes
• Twister Museum Wakita, Oklahoma
• Hear the theme song