Summary

Twister
‘s cast is stacked and the pace is relentless, with the majority being excellent.
The CG holds up well, while some acting is slightly uneven and Bill Paxton feels a little miscast.

Twister
is comfort viewing with high entertainment value, and its quality genuinely holds up.

In 1996, Twister made storm-chasing cool. Actually, it’s probably more fair to say that in 1996, Twister put storm-chasing on the radars of 90% of the world who had no idea it was even a thing. Released in the perfect storm of the 1990s blockbuster season, when nature’s awesome power was something of a Hollywood obsession, Jan de Bont’s breathless actioner became a hit with audiences, while contemporary critics appeared decidedly less awe-struck.

Twister is a lot more than the second-highest grossing movie of 1996 (behind Independence Day), it is something of a time capsule — a love letter to movies that don’t get made anymore. Or it would be, if belated sequel Twisters hadn’t side-winded its way into cinemas in 2024, obviously. And what better excuse to revisit the movie that made flying cows so cool would anyone need?

Twister Director Jan de bont Release Date May 10, 1996 Studio(s) Warner Bros. Pictures Writers Anne-Marie Martin , Michael Crichton Cast Jami Gertz , Helen Hunt , Cary Elwes , Bill Paxton , Phillip Seymour Hoffman , Alan Ruck , Todd Field , Jeremy Davies Runtime 113 minutes Expand

Twister Never Insults Its Own Premise By Being At All Self-Aware

Let’s spin back to that comment about Twister being a movie unlike anything Hollywood makes now. The key distinguishing point here is that Twister is, for every action-soaked minute of its runtime, completely and self-consciously absurd. It follows a Mad Max-like convoy of oddball meteorologists (complete with George Miller-esque nicknames like Bubba, Rabbit, and Preacher) who live solely for the thrill of never quite catching up to extreme weather events.

At no point do we get anything like a backstory for any of these delightful weirdos. There just isn’t the time to get into it. There are tornadoes to chase, after all. All we need to know is that they’re a serious endeavor; as serious as the surfboarding gangs of Point Break. And like Point Break, and Jan de Bont’s other exceptional 1990s action classic, Speed, the key with Twister is that nobody is ever allowed to acknowledge how absolutely unhinged the whole premise is.

There’s no ever-so-clever meta nods to how silly everything is, even when cows fly or a twister attacks a Drive-In theater, creating the iconic shot of the screen disintegrating just as Jack Nicholson proclaims “here’s Johnny” in The Shining. The clown car procession of experts drop impenetrable scientific jargon alongside chest-thumping nonsense like “they’re in the bear cage” and “you can really feel it through a telephoto lens”. It’s all absolutely ludicrous, and it’s utterly irresistible; it’s fun without having to insist it’s secretly in on the joke.

Related Twisters Review: This Unnecessary Twister Sequel Actually Impressed Me Led by the perfect chemistry between Daisy Edgar-Jones and Glen Powell, Twisters provides ample thrills, solid characters, and great technical work.

Twister Nails The Monster Movie Vibe (With Very Little Blood)

Even though it’s a sort of disaster movie, Twister is a lot more like a traditional monster movie, drawing from horror tropes more usually suited to slasher movies. The tornadoes are characters, treated with both reverence and fear by most of the characters (with the notable exception of Cary Elwes’ Jonas), that seem to have personal vendettas against Paxton’s Bill Harding and Helen Hunt’s Jo Harding.

The twisters are captured with still-impressive effects work, and particularly, great sound design. At any given moment, it feels like any of the “dead meat” supporting characters could be sucked up into oblivion or smashed to smithereens. Just two characters die outside the prologue, and only as delicious karma for disrespectful hubris. Everyone else mostly gets away with scratches because they respect the monster movie code.

Somehow, the low kill count doesn’t even compromise the monstrous allure of the twisters. As each one pings Jo’s tracking technology and promises an escalation, the promise of the next set-piece is all that matters. And that’s only ever a few moments away.

Twister Has Bags Of Heart To Back Up The Action

The personal element of the twister’s murderous intent, which again feels ridiculous, is set up very astutely by the prologue, which adheres to the recognized formula of its genre siblings Jaws, Jurassic Park, and later, Emmerich’s Godzilla. In all four cases, the opening hints at the awesome, terrifying power of the monster at the movie’s heart, without ever showing it.

We see it only in human terms, and like all three of the named examples, the human stories anchor the action set-pieces and add spice to the stakes. In the same irresistibly silly spirit, Bill and Jo embark on the most dangerous bout of marriage counseling ever committed to celluloid.

If physical peril weren’t enough, Twister also introduces that most 1990s of story conceits: A Nora Ephron-like romantic entanglement between Jo, Bill, and his new fiancée Dr. Melissa Reeves (Jami Gertz). Naturally, Jo has history with tornadoes, since one killed her father (in the prologue), and Bill is torn between the pull of a normal life with Melissa, and sexy twister chaos with Jo. At no point does anyone believe for a second that it will end any other way than badly for the stick-in-the-mud Doctor.

Twister’s Cast Is Ridiculously Stacked (And The Stand-Out Is Obvious)

Twister’s cast is loaded with familiar faces. Alongside Paxton and Hunt, Cary Elwes stands out, but there are also colorful supporting performances by Alan Ruck, Jeremy Davies, and, improbably, actor-turned-Tár director Todd Field. The most fun, though, as everyone who’s seen this movie will accept without question, is Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Dusty Davies.

Hoffman’s performance has no right to be as it is. He’s playing a labrador of a storm-chaser, with no obvious qualifications, who only seems to be involved in this very serious adventure for a bit of a laugh. He bounds around with endless energy, completely unfazed by witnessing several near-death experiences for his best friends.

Hoffman is far removed from his later roles (and this is more like his underrated part in Along Came Polly) and Dusty, like most of the supporting cast, should be insufferable. He has profound issues with respecting personal space, no off switch, and little respect for wholesome moments. But he also has incredible taste in music (Twister’s soundtrack is an all-timer), and he’s just not onscreen enough.

Related Twister Cast & Where They Are Now While the modern cult classic film Twister stands out for a number of reasons, its iconic cast is one of the contributing factors to its greatness.

There’s Only 1 Big Issue I Have With Twister Now

Hoffman’s performance is not particularly charitable, because it draws so much attention, but Helen Hunt also deserves a lot of credit. Her trauma balances the impossible scale of the tornado set-pieces, and her yearning for Bill is subtly observed. My only problem with the whole thing, is that Bill Paxton is hopelessly miscast.

We’re repeatedly told that Bill is Twister’s answer to Alan Grant in Jurassic Park, a sort of Indiana Jones if he had decided to give up on adventures and really knuckle down on nailing his classroom etiquette. He’s a living legend, but Paxton is forced to play him as a stuffed-shirt TV weatherman (for some reason, the worst insult in this strange world of storm-jocks). He never quite recovers, and the energy you want from Paxton — his wildness — is clipped.

To see him talking scientific mumbo jumbo is just madness. He’s slotted in as the straight guy in the crazy gang, lost to Big Corporate Weather, when you want him to be much more like Dusty. The romantic subplot still works, even if his treatment of Melissa is pretty low, but Paxton’s line delivery is also very uneven at times.

How Does Twister Hold Up In 2024?

The more important question here is why does it matter? But nostalgia is a dangerous thing, and rewatching movies almost 30 years later can bring forth all sorts of new insights. Back in 1996, I didn’t notice the ADR problems, the silly dialogue (like the accusation that Jonas is a “corporate kiss-butt”), or the action movie playbook clichés. In 2024, I struggle to say they impacted my viewing experience in any real way.

The effects aren’t up to modern standards, but that’s because it came out in 1996, and they stand up a lot better than they have any right to. Crucially, De Bont’s framing choices avoid too much heavy scrutiny. Yes, the flying cow is laughable, but there’s so much joy in the accompanying “we’ve got cows” that again, it doesn’t matter.

Related Where Twister Was Filmed (& Why The Locations Look So Authentic) “Where was Twister filmed” is probably a question many fans have wondered after seeing the wide open plains of the natural disaster film.

What I do know is that The Shining Drive-In sequence would be clipped for socials infinitely in 2024 if this was a new movie. I also know that Twister set a formula so impressive that Twisters director Lee Isaac Chung stuck close to it in the sequel. And I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that this is the kind of comfort viewing that makes a mockery of conventional star ratings. Twister is a 3.5 star movie at most, but as blockbuster experiences go, it’s near-enough perfect.

Twister In Twister, Bill and Jo Harding, advanced storm chasers on the brink of divorce, must join together to create an advanced weather alert system by putting themselves in the cross-hairs of extremely violent tornadoes. Jo’s childhood was stricken by the trauma of losing her father to a deadly F5 tornado, setting her on the path of a storm chaser. Having developed a new technology with her team named “Dorothy,” Jo seeks to make Tornadoes more predictable to give people a chance to make it to safety. Jo’s obsession created a rift between her husband, but new breakthroughs may bring them back together as the two pursue their greatest challenge yet – an incoming system that will produce yet another F5. Pros90% of the cast is excellentThe pace is relentless and there’s no pause between set-piecesThe CG holds up wellCary Elwes’ villain is great fun ConsSome of the acting is a little unevenWhisper it, but Bill Paxton is miscast