TWISTER
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1996 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule: Some exciting action scenes punctuate
a plot that is a virtual museum of cliches.
Without too much acting and a bunch of all-too-
familiar story elements, the plot could have used a
few good twists. The story is contrived and lacks
credibility. Not all the tornado scenes are
believable or look real, but some are quite
impressive. Rating: 0 (-4 to +4) [Minor spoilers
in plot description. A discussion of tornadoes
follows main review.]
"We sure been havin' a lot of weather lately." It is a line from an old comedy, somebody trying to make conversation. But the last few years that line seems to have taken on new meaning with record storms, hurricanes, high temperatures, heavy snowfalls, and cold winters. So Amblin Entertainment (by way of Warner Brothers and Universal Pictures) thought that the time was right to make a film about the most violent weather they could. And that, of course, is what they did.
This is a sort of a monster movie in which the monster is not a giant lizard but something a lot less tangible, but a lot more deadly- -a sort of spirit of tornadoes. Back in 1969 the monster came and took Jo Harding's father, and Jo is going to have her vengeance on the beast. And, like with many monster movies, the film lives when the monster is on the screen and the rest of the film is just waiting for those scenes. There are some good action sequences when that tornado (or actually one of several tornadoes) is on the screen. The rest of the story is actively bad as a collection of warmed-over cliches from other films. In addition to the cliche of the vendetta that Jo has against tornadoes, there a love triangle with Jo competing with psychologist Melissa for the affections of Jo's soon-to-be-ex-husband Bill. Bill is himself a former tornado hunter, but now he has decided to give all that excitement up and become a docile TV weatherman. Jo leads a whole group of idealistic young tornado hunters who will win their victory against tornadoes if they can launch a homemade probe into a raging cyclone. Now you would think that a set of angry tornadoes would be opponent enough. But there is also a human enemy, a team of evil tornado hunters who stole the idea of the probe from Bill and have made their own with (gasp!) corporate funding. And while the good guys are a free-thinking ragtag lot who dress casually and chase their tornadoes in mismatched cars and vans, the bad guys have their own armada of vans--all black--they all dress in matching designer outfits, and they steal their ideas and their plans from the idealists every chance they get. And to top it all they bask in television publicity while the good guys are unsung in their heroics. Each team is set on wresting from tornadoes the secret that will let people predict where a tornado will strike fifteen minutes in advance of the hit rather than the current three minutes. The good guys have to get the secret data before the bad guys get it and give it to some corporation.
Because a single tornado lasts for only a few minutes the film contrives to have a series of tornadoes forming over Oklahoma, each larger than the last, to put our two teams in ever increasing danger as they try to jockey themselves into the paths of the storms in the hopes of getting their probes picked up and picked up and spun by one of the deadly funnels. Just how the data can be used to make the tornado more predictable is never explained. This is an odd failing considering the script was co-written by Michael Crichton (and by Anne-Marie Martin, a.k.a. Mrs. Michael Crichton). Crichton likes to explain (and often slam) scientific investigation and it would have been worthwhile to get his explanation for how the data would be used. There is a little scientific exposition, but it is more descriptive than explanatory. We learn, for example, that tornadoes are measured on the Fujita Tornado Intensity Scale (see discussion after review) of the light gale F1 to the incredibly deadly F5 that of all the tornado hunters only Bill has actually seen. An F5 is called "the finger of God." (Now what do you think they would use for the finale of this film?)
This is the second film ex-cinematographer Jan de Bont has directed, the first being SPEED. And he directs like a cameraman. The most memorable characters of TWISTER are all the very visual tornadoes. There is, however, what seems like it might have been an unexpected problem. Action scenes require moderate close-ups. Like an expressionist painting, a tornado looks great from a distance and not so good in a close- up. It is a huge finger sticking out of the sky which is an awe-inspiring sight. Get close enough to it to see it giving our characters' trouble and the tornado no longer looks so impressive. In close-up it looks more like just a big, unimpressive dust cloud. It helps to have it pick up heavy objects and whirl them around, but it is not easy to make a cloud of dust look dramatic. Still, the acting honors go to dust. Spencer Tracy said all that is necessary for acting is to remember your lines and do not bump into the props. Playing tornado hunters Jo and Bill Harding, Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton remember their lines and wait for the props to bump into them. Neither pulls in a whole lot of interest on the screen. As the hapless fiancee of Bill, Jami Gertz fairs a little better, but she is given some really sappy comedy relief lines like explaining to someone who has called her on her cordless phone, "This is not a good time for me," as she rides into the path of a raging tornado. Cary Elwes has little to do as the evil tornado hunter, and the most memorable human in the film is Lois Smith as Aunt Meg who makes wind-driven lawn ornaments and who proves she is a good person by cooking up huge quantities of good-looking food, almost all protein and cholesterol.
A friend has suggested that the script might better have been titled HOWLER. Without much loss, TWISTER could be edited down to twenty minutes of great action scenes, and then it might have gotten better rating than a 0 on the -4 to +4 scale.
We are really just tiny and frail creatures living in a huge sea of atmosphere. The forces that we can create, with the possible exception of nuclear forces, are small compared to some of those routinely--but luckily rarely in our time scale--unleashed by nature. This ocean of atmosphere that we live in can at times have currents that become deadly, and one of the deadliest and most focused forces it can unleash is a tornado. Perhaps lightning has more impact per square inch and a hurricane may last longer and dissipate more force overall, but nothing combines the focus and the sheer power of a tornado: a finger of spinning wind with speed that can uproot trees and swing trailer trucks like they were toys.
Because air is invisible, we can rarely see how much chaotic motion there really is in the atmosphere around us. But unequal heating can cause powerful updrafts of air, as much as 100 miles per hour. With all that air going up in the air, a low pressure area is formed and surrounding air has to rush in to replace it. That air can go straight into the partial vacuum, but sometimes, like an object in decaying orbit around the earth, it instead spirals in. As it spirals in faster and faster, it pulls more and more air with. The air rushes around the low pressure area faster and faster until it is traveling at speeds of up to 300 miles per hour, rushing in to the center to get pulled up the chimney. Along with the air being pulled up comes anything and virtually everything that gets in its way. When this happens over water, a huge spout of water is formed. But when it happens over land what it picks up can be solid objects which get carried along at the same high speeds. The reason we can see the funnel shape of a tornado is that it is picking up dust and dirt from the ground and pulling it into the updraft. Often the color of the tornado is just the color of the soil under it. In the funnel we are also seeing water vapor condensing from the cooling effect of in- rushing air. Colliding with air at the speeds that the air is swirling is deadly, colliding with water is worse, colliding with something solid is incredibly destructive. And a wind this powerful can pick up and whirl around a train locomotive. As the low pressure area moves the deadly finger can move along the ground at speeds from 20 to 70 miles per hour, carrying destruction with it.
As they said in the film, the intensity of tornadoes is measured by the Fujita scale (see below). There can be as many as 1000 tornadoes a year over land, almost always over flat countryside as there is in Kansas, Missouri, and Texas, and especially Oklahoma. Many of these have funnels less than 100 feet wide and last only a few minutes, but tornadoes a mile wide or lasting as long as an hour are not uncommon. Sometimes you can have funnels forming around not around the entire low pressure area but at its edge. And when that happens one can get several tornadoes forming around the same low pressure area. March 18, 1925, there were seven funnels from one low pressure area in the Midwest (especially Illinois) with a resulting death toll of 689.
THE FUJITA TORNADO INTENSITY SCALE (provided by the National Weather Service)
- (F0) Gale tornado (40-72 mph) - Light damage. Some damage to chimneys; break branches off trees; push over shallow-rooted trees; damage sign boards. - (F1) Moderate tornado (73-112 mph) - Moderate damage. The lower limit is the beginning of hurricane wind speed; peel surface off roofs; mobile homes pushed off foundations or overturned; moving autos pushed off the roads. - (F2) Significant tornado (113-157 mph) - Considerable damage. Roofs torn off frame houses; mobile homes demolished; boxcars pushed over; large trees snapped or uprooted; light-object missiles generated. - (F3) Severe tornado (158-206 mph) - Severe damage. Roofs and some walls torn off well-constructed houses; trains overturned; most trees in forest uprooted; heavy cars lifted off the ground and thrown. - (F4) Devastating tornado (207-260) - Devastating damage. Well-constructed houses leveled; structures with weak foundations blown off some distance; cars thrown and large missiles generated. - (F5) Incredible tornado (261-318 mph) - Incredible damage. Strong frame houses lifted off foundations and carried considerable distance to disintegrate; automobile sized missiles fly through the air in excess of 100 meters (109 yards); trees debarked; incredible phenomena will occur.
Mark R. Leeper
mleeper@lucent.com
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