Jurassic Park is a monster movie, right? But it’s also a natural disaster movie. It revels in the awful glee of the natural world having its revenge on foolish mankind and generally fucking shit up. Hollywood seems to have realized this — or at least, intuited it — because Jurassic Park was not followed by a swathe of big-budget dinosaur movies. It was followed, for pretty much the whole of the rest of the 1990s and into the 2000s, by a fad for the natural disaster blockbuster: Volcano, Armageddon, Outbreak, The Day After Tomorrow.
Foremost among these is Twister, the 1996 movie about tornadoes. It stands out for a few reasons. First, it’s just a banging movie. Second, it’s kind of an unofficial sequel to Jurassic Park. It originated as a visual effects proof of concept put together at Steven Spielberg’s request by Industrial Light & Magic, which had done the digital dinos for Jurassic Park. Spielberg was originally attached to direct it, produced it through Amblin Entertainment, and the initial screenplay was co-written by Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton.
Thirdly, Twister proves the thesis for Jurassic Park by reversing it. If Jurassic Park is a monster movie that’s also a natural disaster movie, then Twister is a natural disaster movie that’s also a monster movie.
Directed by Jan de Bont off the back of his impeccably ludicrous action thriller Speed, Twister goes to extraordinary lengths to personalize the weather formations that are its primary antagonist. Or, if not personalize, then monsterize. The tornadoes created by ILM — and further realized by the movie’s sound effects team — are very much living, breathing creatures. They’re terrifying in their capriciousness and their remorseless appetite.
Listen to them carefully. Hear their animal noises: the tremendous, deep baritone roars they emit sound like ferocious tigers. Then there are the unearthly screeches, straight from Jurassic Park‘s velociraptors (and prefiguring the Nazgûl of Peter Jackon’s Lord of the Rings). They’re subtly mixed in and out of all the deafening wind noise, but they’re definitely there, and they signal that these things are predators.
The tornadoes’ status as sentient monsters is reinforced by Twister‘s story structure in a way that’s as genius as it is hilarious. The film’s cold open sees a giant tornado ripping through a farm where a young girl lives with her parents and small dog. They race for the tornado shelter; it seems like the dog is in peril, but at the last moment, it’s the girl’s father that is seized and tossed up into the infinite darkness.
The girl grows up to be Dr. Jo Harding (Helen Hunt), an eminent but renegade tornado scientist. This being a Crichton joint, the plot hinges on scientific progress: Can Jo and her old flame Bill (Bill Paxton) gather more data on the tornadoes’ behavior so as to produce a more accurate, life-saving warning system? There’s a romance plot between Jo and Bill, too (which Crichton said he took from His Girl Friday).
But this is also a story of justice and revenge! Jo is out to overcome her trauma and bring the tornado that killed her father to book. This is an extremely silly idea, but the movie finds a way to make it work.
There’s a classification system for tornadoes, see, which, as Bill explains, “measures the intensity of a tornado by how much it eats.” Eats! The system goes from F1 up to F5. Bill’s clueless fiancee asks if any of Jo and Bill’s rowdy band of tornado chasers (which features a young Philip Seymour Hoffman, among other great character-actor faces) has seen an F5. The group goes silent and solemn. “Just one of us,” Bill says.
Say no more. To paraphrase Meryl Streep in A Cry in the Dark: That F5 ate my daddy!
Of course, an F5 eventually shows up. I won’t spoil the movie, but you can guess at what happens when a giant, swirling, black mass of wind, a mile wide, crosses paths with our human protagonists. Jo and Bill might as well clap a pair of handcuffs on it.
Twister works because it’s rock-solid blockbuster filmmaking from the Amblin school. It’s got a fun script, a fantastically charismatic cast, thrilling music, swooping helicopter shots, evocative location shooting, superbly designed set-pieces, an unforgettable gag with an airborne cow, and visual effects that might look a little blurry 30 years later but still possess an awesome sense of scale. But it also works because everyone involved knew that, while it might be silly to pretend some wind is a monster, it would be even sillier not to.
Twister is streaming on HBO Max.