Twister (1996)

For unknown reasons, Jan de Bont's nineties geographical disaster movie has somehow escaped my eyes until now. After seeing an article surrounding the upcoming sequel Twisters- a nice if perhaps stretching nod to James Cameron's Aliens (1986)- the time felt right to finally set aside a couple of hours for this Bill Paxton (also of Aliens) and Helen Hunt fronted thriller.

Twister is big, dumb, but ultimately satisfying, and a huge amount of fun. I was shocked to learn that the film was a PG; the opening sequence in which a young girl loses her Dad to a violent 'F5' tornado back in 1969, is horrific. That young girl turns out to be Helen Hunt's Jo, as we then shift to the current day, where she is now a tornado obsessed meteorologist on the verge of signing papers that will legally divorce her from her husband Bill (Paxton).

Bill is an ex-storm chaser, driving the whole way to Oklahoma with his new fiancé Melissa to ensure that Jo signs the divorce papers. Or rather Jo has lured Bill back for personal reasons, equipped with a newly functioning machine that can monitor a tornado from the inside whilst it's on the move- a device that Bill invented but never got to see in use.

After a brief meeting between the two of them, Jo races off to chase a storm, conveniently leaving part of her divorce papers unsigned, forcing Bill to chase her and therefore the storm. What unfolds is so predictable you might very well think of skipping the remaining ninety minutes and simply watch something else, but you'd be missing a relentlessly entertaining disaster movie that is still very impressive with its effects over a quarter of a century on.

One worries that the effects of the upcoming Twisters will be so effects laden that the magic of the original will be lost; Twister's tornado's may be questionable in their realism but it's the wind and the weather that offer serious jeopardy here.

It's also a joy of course to see the late Philip Seymour Hoffman on the screen, portraying a young, hilarious storm chaser, and you fully believe in the bond between all of the storm chasing crew- these are friendships that clearly go back a long way.

There's been plenty of disaster films since Twister of course; Roland Emmerich's The Day After Tomorrow (2004) probably being the be pick of them and which also featured some impressive looking tornadoes, and you can trace the roots of the twister in film arguably back to 1943's Tornado.

Maybe I shouldn't have been surprised at how entertaining this was. After all, Jan de Bont's previous film was Speed (1994), one of the all time great thrillers. If Speed is an 'F5' on the Fujita scale of intensity, Twister is probably an F2. Nothing compared to an F5, but on its own terms impressive, and well worth viewing. 7.0/10