Auntie Em, Auntie Em, it’s a crummy movie!
Remember this one? I do, or at least the presence it made in the mid-late nineties. This was the era of Hollywood’s disaster movie resurgence, from Independence Day to Armageddon, where directors like Emmerich and Bay could take CG-overdosing wrecking balls to national landmarks because that hadn’t yet become distasteful. And between genocidal aliens and apocalyptic asteroids, there was another one that tried to aim comparatively down to earth, so to speak, focusing on the very real everyday incarnations of mother nature’s wrath. It did well enough to stick around in the zeitgeist for a good few years—even though it was the type of film that would have most of the American Midwest going ‘hell, why do I gotta pay money for this crap when I can just look out my window’? Then, all of a sudden, like an actual tornado fading into the ether, it vanished from relevance—and perhaps there’s very good reason why.
I wasn’t expecting high art—perhaps some adequate effects overindulgence in mindless havoc. My younger self certainly thought it sounded like a cool idea—whoo, look at those twisters go, turns out cows sure are more aerodynamic than you’d think! But certain things start to hit you very shortly in. The opening scene depicts a family’s eye view of a tornado attack—done right, this’d be pretty effective, drawing you into the all too real terror and adrenaline-spiking anxiety of such a natural disaster. Then it all gets ruined by a very confusingly written death that undermines all the pathos the movie tries to draw from it throughout. And that’s only the beginning.
The main plot is about Bill Paxton leading a team that’s trying to track tornados across the US heartland—fair enough. Alongside him is Helen Hunt, the aforementioned orphan, and together they’re up against both the elements and a rival team of trackers lead by Philip Seymour Hoffman. So far, so reasonable. The only slight tiny little issue is that none of these characters are compelling. At all. Bill is a boring egotist whose obsession with throwing christmas baubles at wind funnels is the only character trait I remember besides his infidelity. Hunt’s character…we’ll get to. And the rest are, well, your typical band of frat bro jackasses. Now, yeah, in this kind of film, you don’t expect riveting drama and rich nuanced personal studies—but between the cars and cattle being tossed around, that leaves basically nothing else. Even other blockbuster extravaganzas around this time had the likes of Will Smith and Bruce Willis to exert actual charisma into scripts that otherwise were mostly variations of ‘and this thing goes boom cuz why not, and then that thing burns up real pretty for no reason, yeah baby!’.
Oh, and at times they also like to ramble about something called the ‘suck zone’. Now, being such a grandiloquent paragon of maturity and sophistication, I must admit my internal reaction to this essentially went thusly.
The next twist—heheh—is that we find out that tornados, as Hunt’s character raves on about, are not not merely vortices caused by reactions of local pressure, but are actually evil serial killers that cause destruction because they hate people for no reason. Or something. The film belabors the metaphors here to the point where I just ended up laughing at the screen. Well, I assume it was an attempt at metaphor, but when a climactic 'F5' starts seemingly deliberately intercepting and roaring at the protagonists, things get a helluva lot more muddled.
So, is there anything else really to remark about? Actually, yeah—the soundtrack, which was mostly dominated by Van Halen no less. I’ve mentioned before that I’m more of an AC/DC guy, but it’s not for no reason that VH’s logo was essentially the emblem of the eighties for half a generation, and the sadly departed Eddie Van Halen himself rightfully inscribed his place into rock history with the fiery passion of white-hot awesome iconic guitar riffs. And here? Well, I gotta admit, I don’t mind Humans Being. It may not be on the level of Panama or Ain’t Talking Bout Love, and you do kinda have to listen to it for the solos—but that’s what VH was largely about, and that’s at least one positive I’m happy to give here!
At the end of that, after malevolent wind storms and a lot of cars being picked up, is Twister worth revisiting? No, not really, frankly. I’d say just go watch the actual tornado bits on Youtube, but even that is somewhat redundant now. Back in the nineties, capturing decent footage of tornados generally required professional crews in the right place—but now, any farmer with an iPhone can give a look at such forces up close. What nature can come up with is often far more terrifying than any Hollywood exaggeration—an actual tornado doesn’t need to roar at you, or pretend to be Jason Voorhees, but they nonetheless descend as unfeeling, randomly striking wraiths of darkness and death to the cold drone of stormwinds. Just this sheer moving mass of black slowly and impassively approaching over a horizon is an image I find scary enough without needing Bill Paxton running around.
And with unfortunate changes in climate now making themselves evident, with these kinds of events increasing in the Midwest alone, that perhaps will go doubly as time passes…
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