Twister is a 1996 American epic disaster adventure film directed by Jan de Bont from a screenplay by Michael Crichton and Anne-Marie Martin. Released in theaters on May 10, 1996, it was executive produced by Steven Spielberg, Walter Parkes, Laurie MacDonald, and Gerald R. Molen.
The film stars Helen Hunt, Bill Paxton, Jami Gertz and Cary Elwes, and focuses on a group of storm chasers trying to deploy a tornado research device during a severe outbreak in Oklahoma. The film was licensed by Universal, although it is owned by Warner Bros.
A sequel, titled Twisters, is set to be released on July 19, 2024.
Synopsis[]
The film follows extreme storm chasers who are on the brink of a acrimonious divorce team up to find an F5 tornado to release Dorothy, which is a scientific tornado instrument as a violent outbreak of tornadoes rip across the Midwest.
Cast[]
Main[]
- Helen Hunt as Jo Ann Harding
- Alexa Vega as Young Jo Thornton
- Bill Paxton as Bill "The Extreme" Harding
- Jami Gertz as Melissa Reeves
- Cary Elwes as Jonas Miller
- Philip Seymour Hoffman as Dustin "Dusty" Davis
- Alan Ruck as Robert "Rabbit" Nurick
Supporting[]
- Sean Whalen as Allan Sanders
- Jeremy Davies as Brian Laurence
- Joey Slotnick as Joey
- Todd Field as Tim "Beltzer" Lewis
- Scott Thomson as Jason "Preacher" Rowe
- Lois Smith as Aunt Meg Greene
- Zach Grenier as Eddie
- Richard Lineback as Mr. Thornton
- Rusty Schwimmer as Mrs. Thornton
- Jake Busey as Mobile Lab Technician
- Abraham Benrubi as Bubba, the Mobile Lab Driver
Plot Summary[]
In 1969, on a farm in Oklahoma, a little girl Jo and her family take refuge from an F5 tornado. The storm ravages their farm and claims the life of Jo's father as he struggles to secure their cellar door. Twenty-seven years later, Jo has become a determined meteorologist leading a diverse group of storm chasers. Her estranged husband, Bill Harding, once a storm chaser and now a TV weatherman, arrives in Oklahoma with his fiancée, Melissa to get Jo's signature on divorce paperwork.
Jo unveils "Dorothy" to Bill, a device he originally designed. Dorothy, filled with small weather sensors, has the potential to transform tornado research by providing earlier warnings, but it must be placed dangerously close to a tornado. Jo's team races to chase a developing storm, with Bill and Melissa trailing them as Jo hasn't signed the papers. Jonas Miller, a competing storm chaser with corporate backing, has stolen Bill's concept for his own version of Dorothy. Infuriated, Bill joins Jo's team for a day to ensure Dorothy's success. During the chase, Jo's truck crashes into a ditch, forcing her and Bill to take cover under a bridge as the tornado destroys the vehicle and one of the Dorothy prototypes. Bill then leads the team in his truck, predicting the tornado's path accurately and avoiding Jonas. The team encounters two waterspouts that violently toss their vehicle, leaving Melissa shaken.
The team stops at Jo's Aunt Meg's house in Wakita for rest. Melissa learns about Jo's traumatic past and Bill's storm-chasing days, while Meg hints that Bill and Jo still have feelings for each other. Rushing to intercept another tornado, an erratic F3, they lose the second Dorothy prototype to fallen powerlines. Jo breaks down over the failure and her father's death, while Bill confesses his feelings for her, unaware that Melissa overhears via the CB radio.
As they repair their vehicles overnight in Fairview, Jo finally signs the divorce papers. An unexpected F4 tornado forces them to take shelter in a drive-in theater's garage pit, destroying two of their vehicles and injuring several people. Realizing Wakita is in danger, the team rushes to the town, and Melissa ends her relationship with Bill, urging him to reconcile with Jo.
The tornado devastates Wakita and flattens Aunt Meg's house, but the team rescues her. She encourages Jo to continue her research. Anticipating a record-breaking tornado the next day, Bill and Jo modify the last two Dorothy prototypes with aluminum "wings" for better aerodynamics.
The following day, they chase a massive F5 tornado. Attempting to deploy Dorothy III, it is destroyed by debris. Jonas ignores their warnings and is killed by the tornado. With the final Dorothy attached to their truck, Bill and Jo drive into the tornado's path and escape just in time. The device successfully releases its probes, providing valuable data. They find shelter in a pumphouse, witnessing the tornado's core as it passes. After the storm dissipates, the team celebrates their achievement, and Jo and Bill rekindle their relationship.
Production[]
Twister was produced by Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment, with financial backing from Warner Bros. Pictures and Universal Pictures. In return, Warner Bros. was given the North American distribution rights, while Universal's joint venture distribution company United International Pictures (UIP) obtained international distribution rights. The original concept and 10-page tornado-chaser story was presented to Amblin Entertainment in 1992, written by Jeffrey Hilton under the title 'Catch the Wind'. Steven Spielberg was intrigued by the idea and presented the concept to writer Michael Crichton. Crichton and his wife, Anne-Marie Martin, were paid a reported $2.5 million to write the screenplay, which made Twister the single most expensive screenplay ever written at that time. Spielberg himself was originally attached to direct the project, and directors such as James Cameron, John Badham, and Robert Zemeckis were also in talks to helm the film before Jan de Bont signed on to Twister after leaving Godzilla due to creative differences.
The production was plagued with problems: Joss Whedon was brought in to rewrite through the early spring of 1995. When Whedon contracted bronchitis, Steven Zaillian was brought in to work on script revisions. Whedon later returned and worked on revisions right through the start of shooting in May 1995, then left the project after he got married. Two weeks into production, Jeff Nathanson was flown to the set and worked on the script until principal photography ended.
Filming was to originally take place in the United Kingdom and California, but De Bont insisted the film be shot on location in Oklahoma. Shooting commenced all over the state; several scenes, including the opening scene where the characters meet each other, as well as the first tornado chase in the Jeep pickup, were filmed in Fairfax and Ralston, Oklahoma. The scene at the automotive repair shop was filmed in Maysville and Norman. The waterspout scenes were filmed on Kaw Lake near Kaw City. The drive-in scene was filmed at a real drive-in theater in Guthrie, though some of the scene, such as Melissa's hotel room, was filmed in Stillwater near the Oklahoma State University campus.
The real town of Wakita – serving as the hometown of Lois Smith's character, Meg, in the film – was used during filming, and a section of the older part of town was demolished for the scene showing the aftermath of the F4 tornado that devastates the town. Additional scenes and B-roll were filmed near Ponca City and Paul's Valley, among several other smaller farm towns across the state. However, due to changing seasons that massively transformed the look of Oklahoma's topography, filming was moved to Iowa. The climactic scene with the F5 tornado was almost entirely shot around Eldora, Iowa, with the cornfield the characters run through located near Ames. The "twister hill" scene was shot on 130th Street near the small town of Pilot Mound. [citation needed] Some additional footage was shot north of Pilot Mound, near the town of Dayton. After primary filming had wrapped, additional pick-up shots and reshoots, which included the opening scene and additional footage of the drive-in tornado, took place in Bolton, Ontario.
Halfway through filming, both Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt were temporarily blinded by bright electronic lamps used to make the sky behind the two actors look dark and stormy. Paxton remembers that "these things literally sunburned our eyeballs. I got back to my room, I couldn't see". To solve the problem, a Plexiglas filter was placed in front of the beams. The actors took eye drops and wore special glasses for a few days to recuperate. After filming in a particularly unsanitary ditch (for the first tornado chase scene, in which Bill and Jo are forced to shelter from an approaching F1 tornado under a short bridge), Hunt and Paxton needed hepatitis shots. During the same sequence, Hunt repeatedly hit her head on a low wooden bridge, so exhausted from the demanding shoot that she stood up so quickly her head struck a beam. During one stunt in which Hunt opened the door of a vehicle speeding through a cornfield, she momentarily let go of the door and it struck her on the side of the head. Some sources claim she received a concussion in the incident. De Bont said, "I love Helen to death, but you know, she can be also a little bit clumsy. " She responded, "Clumsy? The guy burned my retinas, but I'm clumsy ... I thought I was a good sport. I don't know ultimately if Jan chalks me up as that or not, but one would hope so".
Some crew members, feeling that De Bont was "out of control", left the production five weeks into filming. The camera crew led by Don Burgess claimed De Bont "didn't know what he wanted till he saw it. He would shoot one direction, with all the equipment behind the view of the camera, and then he'd want to shoot in the other direction right away and we'd have to move [everything] and he'd get angry that we took too long ... and it was always everybody else's fault, never his". De Bont claims that they had to schedule at least three scenes every day because the weather changed so often, and "Don had trouble adjusting to that".
When De Bont knocked over a camera assistant in a fit of rage who missed a cue, Burgess and his crew walked off the set, much to the shock of the cast. They remained in place for one more week until Jack N. Green's crew agreed to replace them. Two days before principal filming ended, Green was injured when a hydraulic house set (used in the scene in which Jo and Bill rescue Meg and her dog, Mose, from her tornado-destroyed home in Wakita), designed to collapse on cue, was mistakenly activated with him inside it. A rigged ceiling hit him in the head and injured his back, requiring him to be hospitalized. De Bont took over as his own director of photography for the remaining shots.
Because overcast skies were not always available, De Bont had to shoot many of the film's tornado-chasing scenes in bright sunlight, requiring Industrial Light & Magic to more than double its original plan for 150 "digital sky-replacement" shots. Principal photography was originally given a deadline to allow Hunt to return to film the fourth season of her NBC sitcom Mad About You, but when shooting ran over schedule, series creator and actor Paul Reiser agreed to delay the show's production for two-and-a-half weeks so Twister could finish filming. De Bont insisted on using multiple cameras, which led to the exposure of 1,300,000 feet (400,000 m) of film, compared to the usual maximum of 300,000 feet (91,000 m).
De Bont claims that Twister cost close to $70 million, of which $2–3 million went to the director. It was speculated that last-minute re-shoots in March and April 1996 (to clarify a scene about Jo as a child) and overtime requirements in post-production and at ILM, raised the budget to $90 million. The film's original release date was set to be on May 17. To avoid audience cannibalization with the release of Paramount's Mission: Impossible on May 22, Twister's release date would be pushed forward to May 10, 1996. The premiere took place at the AMC Penn Square 10, then known as General Cinema Theatres at Penn Square Mall in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma a day prior. Jan de Bont, Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt were at the mall for interviews.
Prints of Twister came with a note from De Bont, suggesting that exhibitors play the film at a higher volume than normal for full effect.
Reception[]
Critical response[]
Even though the film received mixed reviews, many fans had praised the jaw-dropping special effects that brought the storms to life. On Rotten Tomatoes the film had an approval rating of 60% based on 65 reviews, and an average rating of 6/10. The site's critics consensus read: "A high-concept blockbuster that emphasizes special effects over three-dimensional characters, Twister's visceral thrills are often offset by the film's generic plot." On Metacritic the film had a weighted average score of 68 out of 100, based on 17 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[16] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A–" on an A+ to F scale.
Roger Ebert gave the film two-and-a-half stars out of four and wrote, "You want loud, dumb, skillful, escapist entertainment? Twister works. You want to think? Think twice about seeing it". In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, "Somehow Twister stays as up-tempo and exuberant as a roller-coaster ride, neatly avoiding the idea of real danger". [19] Entertainment Weekly gave the film a "B" rating and Lisa Schwarzbaum wrote, "Yet the images that linger longest in my memory are those of windswept livestock. And that, in a teacup, sums up everything that's right, and wrong, about this appealingly noisy but ultimately flyaway first blockbuster of summer".[20] In his review for the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan wrote, "But the ringmaster of this circus, the man without whom nothing would be possible, is director De Bont, who now must be considered Hollywood's top action specialist. An expert in making audiences squirm and twist, at making us feel the rush of experience right along with the actors, De Bont choreographs action and suspense so beautifully he makes it seem like a snap." Time magazine's Richard Schickel wrote, "when action is never shown to have deadly or pitiable consequences, it tends toward abstraction. Pretty soon you're not tornado watching, you're special effects watching". In his review for the Washington Post Desson Howe wrote, "it's a triumph of technology over storytelling and the actors' craft. Characters exist merely to tell a couple of jokes, cower in fear of downdrafts and otherwise kill time between tornadoes".
Box office[]
The film opened on May 10, 1996, and earned $41 million from 2,414 total theaters, making it the #1 movie at the North American box office. Twister went on to earn a total of $241.7 million at the North American box office, and a worldwide total of $494.5 million. It became the second highest grossing film of 1996, after Independence Day, and was the tenth highest grossing film in history at the time of its release, making it Warner Bros.' most successful film release at that time. As of 2020, Twister ranks at #76 among the highest-grossing North American movie releases of all-time; worldwide, it places #105 on the all-time earners list, not adjusted for inflation.
Awards[]
Twister received Academy Award nominations for Best Visual Effects and Best Sound, but lost both to Independence Day and The English Patient respectively.
Release[]
Home media[]
Twister was released on VHS and Laserdisc by Warner Home Video on October 1, 1996. The film was released on DVD on March 26, 1997, and is considered to be the first home release of a movie to use the now widely used optical media technology. The DVD release occurred eleven days before Twister made its pay-cable debut on HBO on April 5, deviating from the then-standard film release "window" that normally placed a four- to six-month gap between a movie's initial home video release, which typically overlapped with its pay-per-view availability period and premium cable distribution window. The VHS, Laserdisc and DVD releases were all digitally mastered by THX for superior sound and picture quality.
Gallery[]
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