TWISTER
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1996 Scott Renshaw
(Warner Bros.) Starring: Helen Hunt, Bill Paxton, Cary Elwes, Jami Gertz. Screenplay: Michael Crichton, Anne-Marie Martin. Director: Jan DeBont. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
The makers of big-budget summer movies and those who attend those movies appear to have come to an understanding, an understanding best exemplified by an observation I made while watching TWISTER. Several times during the film, there would come a point where it would become clear that the latest sequence showcasing Industrial Light & Magic's computer-generated tornados was at an end (it usually coincided with the dialogue once again becoming audible), at which point several members of the audience would stand up and quickly make their way towards the restroom. They were probably rather secure in the knowledge that they would not miss any crucial plot twists or juicy bits of character development during these brief expository interludes, and even if they did, they were not missing what they had come to the film to see. Not a penny of the money they had plunked down would be wasted if they missed a couple of the characters engaged in conversation.
It is this complicity which produces monotonous displays of technological prowess like TWISTER, a film with a script that makes JURASSIC PARK's look positively labyrinthine by comparison. The shell of a story involves a pair of daredevil meteorologists named Jo (Helen Hunt) and Bill (Bill Paxton) who are about to finalize their divorce after years of chasing storms together. Bill is engaged to another woman (Jami Gertz), and comes to collect the divorce papers just as Jo and her team are about to set off in pursuit of a rare series of tornados. Naturally, Bill comes along as they attempt to deploy a device which will provide valuable data for predicting tornados, just as a corporate-financed (and hence evil) competitor named Jonas (Cary Elwes) is attempting to do the same thing. Also naturally, the device can only work if it is picked up by a tornado crossing its path, which results in the scientists racing to catch up with twisters so they can leave one of devices.
I suppose you have to give the creators of TWISTER credit for coming up with a premise which involves people trying their damnedest to get close to tornados rather than trying their damnedest to get very far away; it could have been even more tedious. The problem is that it doesn't take long before TWISTER starts to look like a loop film. There are only so many ways you can film a bunch of vehicles driving through fields, over dirt roads, along highways before it becomes a chore to watch, and while director Jan DeBont uses every swooping trick at his disposal, there is an awful lot of nothing going on during TWISTER an awful lot of the time. There may be more driving in TWISTER than there was in DeBont's debut feature SPEED.
Of course, SPEED had Sandra Bullock playing an actual character to engage the audience; TWISTER has Helen Hunt playing producer and co-scripter Michael Crichton's generically flinty female scientist character. Hunt is probably a better actor than Bullock, and certainly provides the requisite cuteness factor, but Bullock's heroine was able to comment on SPEED's improbability throughout the film with her priceless reactions. The trite love/hate relationship with which Hunt is saddled is something no one could tunnel out from under, and neither she nor Paxton has the big screen charisma to make the scenes without inclement weather anything but a monumental bore. Every single character manages the astonishing non-Euclidean feat of being less than one-dimensional, with characterization coming in such subtle forms as the fleet of identical black mini-vans used by Elwes' corporate scientists (as though you actually needed to see the three 6's behind his ear) or the Van Halen tunes blasted by one of Hunt's more annoyingly quirky cohorts (Philip Seymour Hoffman).
Films like TWISTER are often defended with comparisons to amusement park rides -- that they make up in thrills what they lack in drama. I don't think TWISTER even qualifies as a roller-coaster. Yes, the visual effects are impressive, but it is impossible to watch them with anything but detachment, because as much as DeBont tries, he can't imbue a natural phenomenon with a personality (he actually tries harder than he does with his actors). TWISTER is a surprisingly gloomy and inert experience, with exactly two flashes of inspiration through its two hour running time. When they come, they only serve to remind you what the rest of the film is lacking: any sense of the fun that summer movies are supposed to provide. Whatever one might think of the increasing mindlessness of effects-driven blockbusters, you'd think they could at least manage to entertain, or to give you a reason to come back when you get up to go to the restroom.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 sucking sounds: 3.
-- Scott Renshaw Stanford University http://www-leland.stanford.edu/~srenshaw
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