Twister **** (1996, Helen Hunt, Bill Paxton, Philip Seymour Hoffman) – Classic Movie Review 996

In director Jan (Speed) de Bont’s breezy 1996 action-adventure thriller/ disaster movie, the main stars are Industrial Light and Magic’s spectacular special visual effects (though they lost out to those for Independence Day at the Academy Awards). Twister is quite a lot of wet and windy fun.

It’s the effects that you notice and remember rather than human players Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton, starring as an estranged married couple of meteorologists who chase tornadoes instead of running away from them like the rest of us. Paxton plays TV weatherman Bill Harding, who is trying to get his tornado-hunter wife, Jo (Hunt), to sign their divorce papers so he can marry his new girlfriend Melissa (Jami Gertz) just when intense storms start sweeping across Oklahoma.

Nevertheless, refusing to be dwarfed by the effects, the admirable Hunt and Paxton are excellent in de Bont’s amusingly cheesy and commendably fast-moving slice of high adventure. It’s a shame that some sloppy and scrappy dialogue in Michael Crichton and Anne-Marie Martin’s screenplay sometimes lets it down badly. The duo won the 1997 Razzie Award for Worst Written Film Grossing Over $100 Million.

Cary Elwes, Lois Smith, Alan Ruck, Todd Field and the late Philip Seymour Hoffman (as Dustin Davis) are notable among the star support players.

It won the 1997 Bafta Award for Best Achievement in Special Visual Effects.

Hilariously in the US  it had a PG-13 certificate ‘for intense depiction of very bad weather’. It was PG in the UK.

It’s so much better than the similar 2014 Into the Storm that it hurts.

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(C) Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 996

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