TWISTER
A film review by Robin Redcrest
Copyright 1996 USPAN
The URL of this review is http://moviereviews.com/janesreviews/twister.html
Rating: 3.5 (out of 4)
Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines - the summer blockbuster season has begun!
And, begun with a bang and a flourish and big gust of wind, courtesy of the team of Stephen Spielberg, Kathleen Kennedy and Michael Crichton. Been a while since a movie has made me sweat, but I walked out of "Twister" with sore muscles from clenching the armrests, and some unsightly stains on the underarms of my sweatshirt.
I've heard it said that the special effects are the stars of this movie. No question but what they are spectacular, and a large part of the reason for the nail biting suspense. But a lot of the credit for the intensity of this film has to go to Helen Hunt. Willing to ride right into the eye of the storm, it's her intensity, bravery and ability to look life square in the face that takes you places a movie doesn't normally go.
Usually, if a woman is a hero in an action film, she's an Amazon. Grace Jones comes to mind - a not quite human woman, and therefore a cinematically acceptable hero. Hunt has none of that. You learn at the beginning that she's motivated to be a storm chaser because of seeing her father swept out of the family storm cellar during a tornado in the mid-60s. She's got a core of sadness, but she's driven and focused and passionate about her work. Now that's a reasonable motivation.
Her mission is to lead a motley band of other scientists to make the first tornado sensor designed to be sucked up into the funnel for precise data gathering. The rest of her team, are guys, who seem to have not one ounce of angst about working for a woman. It's clear that they'd rather be working for her than for the well funded, souless male competitor who's vans all match and who hogs all of the TV cameras in his efforts to beat her to the punch. I don't blame them. I liked her. They obviously do too. No big deal.
Enter the sub plot of the fact that she co-invented this wonder device with her soon to be ex-husband, the highly appealing Bill Paxton. He comes to get her to sign the divorce papers and stays to help her launch the sensor. Paxton is equally - and I truly mean equally - as strong a character. It's clear why they a) really love each other and b) have a tough time living together. Two people who are this smart and this dedicated have to run into power struggles.
But the struggles are real. They aren't some trumped up guys versus gals type of thing that has to end in the woman capitulating to the man's sensitive ego. They're the struggles of two human beings trying to figure out where they each belong in life and caring so much about each other that confronting their lack of ability to work it out hurts way more than just separating.
Here's a switch - what causes this to work is Hunt's combination of brains and fearlessness and Paxton's instincts. Thanks to Spielberg and his camp for giving us a female hero with brains and a male hero with intuition. And for making that part of the movie no big deal, just part of a really good story.
It's well written, (mostly) and well acted, by folks it's very easy to care about. See this movie for a fabulous story about people with heart achieving the impossible and winding up winners.
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