TWISTER: 4K UHD Blu-ray (Warner Bros./Universal, 1996) Warner Home Video

Jan de Bont’s Twister (1996) is a one premise wonder – two hours into the oft’ thoughtless and occasionally mind-numbing stupidity of a particular group of storm chasers obsessed with getting up close and personal with one of Mother Nature’s most awesome forces of destruction.  And yet, in hindsight, and particularly in lieu of the dreck being peddled in America’s cinemas today as ‘action’ entertainment, it could almost pass as high art. America’s ‘tornado alley’ is a perennial nightmare for its mid-western residents, stretching from northern Texas, through Oklahoma, Kansas and into Nebraska. It is an ominous, if seemingly uninspired stretch of flat rural plains, occasionally dotted with the imposing wood-framed farmhouse or modern day metal-constructed barn, neither weather-resistant against the howling F-5 wind tunnels barreling through when the barometer drops and that toxic clash of cool dry air mixes with a warm body of humidity traveling south.

Okay, news flash; you’re not watching a movie like Twister for plot. And yet, the narrative loosely strung together by screenwriters, Michael Crichton and Anne-Marie Martin between hellish touchdowns is not as bent on clichés as one might expect. Oh sure, we still have the feuding love/hate thing happening between butch weather guy, Bill Harding (Bill Paxton) and his tart-mouthed soon (never to be) ex, Dr. Jo Harding (Helen Hunt). There is even more foreseeable male chest-thumping for Bill – ostensibly retired and thusly considered something of a sell-out and/or figure of fun by rival storm chaser, cocky Dr. Jonas Miller (Carey Elwes) – an anemic egghead, who fatally relies on scientific instrumentation rather than intuition to pursue his kicks. Finally, and, rather predictably, we get a lovable assortment of ragamuffins, played by the late Philip Seymour Hoffman (looney tune, Dustin Davis), Lois Smith (as Jo’s aunt/I-Mother Earth metal artist, Meg Greene) and Jami Gertz (a basket case psychoanalyst – and Bill’s fiancée, Dr. Melissa Reeves). No one could ever accuse Twister of being ‘Gone with the Wind’ (pun intended), even if this is the mother of all gales taking Dorothy back to Kansas. So, director, Jan de Bont has come up with a summer blockbuster that, so many years later, continues to divert, entertain and numb the senses. It’s just the sort of caliginous claptrap of CGI and melodrama one might expect from a TNT movie of the week/Weather Channel hybrid.

I may sound like I’m bashing Twister, but I’ll save those barbs for its soon-to-be-release, pointless sequel – Twisters (2024). Because, actually, upon renewed viewing the original Twister’s cornball idiocy and then state-of-the-art special effects hold up rather nicely, even under jaded scrutiny. Miraculously, the plot (such as it is) is more than sustainable. Like so many summer blockbusters that were to follow, and, less successfully copy it, Twister is not a narrative movie per say (although there is something of a ‘story’ to be had between funnel clouds). And no mistaking, Twister is an excuse for digital effects artists to show off some of the uber-clever tricks in their CGI toolbox. Having seen enough truly awful CGI since to know the difference, what’s here is competently rendered, the digital world colliding rather succinctly – and invisibly – with the live action ‘dumb show’ from our actors.  The Crichton/Martin screenplay plays it safe, distilling the science of storm-chasing into easily digestible factoids so as not to bore the audience. We are left with the occasionally stomach-churning and usually woeful and pedestrian lamentation on a severely flawed lover's triangle, relying almost entirely on star personalities, and Jami Getz’s whack-a-doodle spew as our comedy relief (she is quite effective in this) to carry the menial dialogue.

Twister isn’t high art or even ‘high concept’, just good ole-fashioned schlock yarn for which de Bont has gleaned the well-established principles of the classic disaster epic and streamlined the process somewhat to include less star-power and more bits of catastrophic destruction. And de Bont makes no bones about the real star of his picture. It’s the raw unpredictability of Mother Nature. The opening credits get swept away by a few threatening bars of composer, Mark Mancina’s underscore, dissolving to an unhealthily still late evening sunset in rural Kansas and then, the deluge. We witness a young Jo Thornton (Alexa PenaVega) hurried into a storm cellar as her family, (Rusty Schwimmer and Richard Lineback) race on foot to escape a midnight twister tearing up the farmland directly behind them. Dad doesn’t make it out alive, and this becomes the impetus for adult Jo’s fascination with storm-chasing. We flash ahead to the present, de Bont giving us the lay of the land – literally – with an exhilarating helicopter shot across the bucolic landscape, zeroing in on a Ford pickup catapulting down a dirt road. Weather dude, Bill Harding and his fiancée, the neurotic Melissa, are hurrying to catch up to Jo and her storm chasing team. It’s been months since Bill served Jo with divorce papers she has yet to sign. This delay basically serves as the crux for the rest of the movie’s plot, with Jo, outwardly agreeing to the divorce, yet somehow never getting around to affixing her signature to make it official. Refreshingly, and despite being something of scatterbrain, Melissa is not the cliché bitch – or at the very least, possessively demanding ‘other’ woman. She loves Bill and is fairly sympathetic toward Jo too. But she really has no concept of what or why storm chasers do what they do. This leads to some friction along the way.

Jo shows Bill ‘Dorothy’ – a prototype weather satellite they designed while still together but built with funds accrued after their split. Dorothy can measure wind velocity inside the core of a tornado. The difficulty is in strategically placing her in a twister’s destructive path. Bill is enthralled to realize his pipedream has become a reality. Leaving storm-chasing for the relatively safe profession of weatherman (those how can’t do – teach) was one reason why he and Jo split. But now ‘Dorothy’ seems to have brought the couple together. Bill, with Melissa’s complicity, elects to follow Jo and her team toward the site of a brewing natural disaster. Unprepared for what lies ahead when man confronts nature, Melissa is mildly shell-shocked as debris and a wayward cow float through space between a pair of waterspouts spawned by this natural depression. A short while later, while stopping at a nearby truck stop for some coffee and lunch, we are introduced to Dr. Jonas Miller – a fairly snarky windbag who once considered Bill his competition, but now quaintly thinks of him as little more than a sell-out and has-been. After another confrontation with Mother Nature, in which Bill and Jo narrowly escape an unpredictable funnel, forced to drive into a ditch and seek refuge under a rickety wooden bridge, Jo elects to take everyone to her Aunt Meg’s for a home-cooked breakfast and a little TLC. Meg is devoted to Jo. Moreover, she has always believed Bill and Jo were meant to be together.

Twister’s middle act is predictable in the extreme. There is never any doubt Jo and Bill are on the way to reconciliation. Poor, cosmopolitan Melissa. She’s destined to go home alone. Even more foreseeable: pompous risk-taker, Jonas, will meet with an untimely end. And so, Melissa becomes the first casualty by her own design, graciously bowing out after another late-night tornado all but decimates the small town where Bill, Melissa, Jo and the rest were forced to take refuge, narrowly escaping an F-3 monster. We move into the penultimate search and rescue after Meg’s farm is leveled and Meg is buried alive inside the crumbling remains of her house. Jonas sets his team on a collision course with the F-4, trusting his instrumentation to calculate the trajectory of the funnel. Instead, the twister engulfs and carries off his truck, the vehicle and its occupants hurled down to the earth in a hellish explosion witnessed by Jo and Bill. Jo is now even more obsessed to make a success of Dorothy. Driving toward an F-5, Jo promises Bill this will be the last time for her. It really is time to settle down and get serious about life, especially since Bill has decided to remain at her side.

Sending Dorothy into the vortex, along with Bill’s truck (a thorough waste of a perfectly good F-150), Jo and Bill are forced to flee for their lives as the F-5 hellcat turns with a vengeance, seemingly to stalk them. The couple takes refuge inside a flimsy pump house, strapping themselves against its metal groundwater beam just as the funnel strikes. Bill and Jo get an insider’s view of this monstrous wind tunnel before it dissipates into thin air, the nightmare over for Jo as she quietly observes the family of a nearby farmhouse – mother, father and young daughter – emerging from their fortified storm cellar, virtually unscathed. Time to focus on the more important things in life: love, family, and, the luxury of having survived a thoroughly impossible weather scenario.

Twister won’t win any awards for originality. But this was never its intent. It’s a disaster movie – cribbing from fairly standardized clichés. It’s straight-forward to a fault. There’s just enough tangible melodrama between touchdowns and narrow escapes to keep the audience mildly amused and focused. De Bont has made a formidable popcorn muncher. It can still rattle the nerves in increments and distract from the fact it’s not an outstanding achievement in the cinema firmament. Not every move has to be Gone with the Wind. But at least every movie should strive to be the best of its kind. Twister isn’t the best. But it doesn’t miss the mark by all that much either. The characters – cartoony in spots and painted in very broad, brush strokes – are nevertheless engaging, more so because it is Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton we are invested in - not their fictional alter egos. Even more gratifying, de Bont and his cameraman, Jack N. Green have resisted the urge to overdo the whole ‘hand-held’ camera jitteriness that continues to plague far too many contemporary action movies. Instead, they rely on some classic, stable long shots, evenly paced set-ups with a few jump cuts to get the adrenaline pumping, and thus, proving (as though proof were needed) you can still make a competent (even good) thrill ride and not offset the audience’s equilibrium to the point of nausea.  There are enough discombobulating SFX on tap in Twister without any help from a cameraman suffering from an artistic attack of faux Parkinson’s. 

Fair enough, the meandering subplot involving rival storm chaser, Jonas Miller is a bit too timid to be believed and far more liable in its outcome. De Bont plays up Miller’s high-tech gadgetry as no match for Bill's earthy gut feelings. It’s the old egghead vs. the sensual man argument. Alas, this rivalry lacks antagonism. Cary Elwes entirely the wrong type – physically – to pull it off. Beefy Bill Paxton could mop the floor with Elwes’ ghost of a guy given half the opportunity. But we never get this ‘gloves off’ altercation, just an interminable amount of Elwes’ simpering, eventually resting on his bony haunches and following Bill’s lead like a lap dog. The one-time Miller deviates from his indecision gets him killed, proving the real he-man by default. A shame too we don’t get more of Bill’s relationship with Melissa because Jami Getz is an interesting actress. She is exceedingly patient, compassionate and understanding to a fault. In any sane life scenario, Mel’ would win her man. She clearly represents the more loving choice. Then again, Bill’s toxic decision to discard Mel’ in mid-plot and slink back to his seriously damaged relationship with Jo, arguably, never having worked in the first place, is decidedly in keeping with his own flawed character.   

Twister is improbable, silly, good fun. The epic winds are all computer-generated, hurling farm machinery, tankers, people, homes and even a bovine or two while the principles react with faux conviction and awe. But De Bont knows how to build dramatic tension. He cleverly starts us off with an invisible colossus, the F-2 unseen under the cover of night, whetting our appetites to strain and learn more as he gradually unleashes bigger and more graphically illustrated funnel clouds on the horizon. Twister is more expertly crafted than practically any disaster flick currently playing at your local cinema. So, get ready to swing and careen around the room, experiencing this ‘dark ride’ racing towards its inevitable conclusion. Twister is diverting. But it holds up as a prelude to the real lazy days of summer storms yet to come, an ominous aide-mémoire as to how cruel Mother Nature can be for those living in the real-life disaster belt.  The irony of Twister is there is not a whole lot to recommend it and yet, it entertains. Mid-westerners will likely wonder what all the fuss is about. After all, they can see the real thing for free. But for those unaccustomed to 'tornado alley', Twister delivers the movie-land rush and equivalent without the messy post-storm clean-up.  There is enough voyeurism here to satisfy the adventurist, settling in for a night of relative safety in their living rooms…leave the cows outside.

Warner Home Video’s 4K debut of Twister is impressive. This native 4K remaster sports subdued, but accurate colors. Predictably, fine details advance over the old Blu-ray release from 2013, and overall image refinement is duly noted. Interestingly, the SFX, rendered only in 2K, appear seamlessly integrated here, and, while never exactly to attain a level of finite detail, nevertheless, appear indigenous to their source. Contrast is uniformly excellent and a light smattering of film grain is shown off to its best advantage.  Now, to clarify. Twister has undergone some ‘tweaking’ in its color balancing and contrast, mostly to address what fans considered was an overall ‘brightening/sharpening’ effect that plagued the original Blu-ray release. Also, to reinstate the natural grain texture which was expunged to the nth degree on the Blu, making the image appear glossy rather than gritty. Fear not. Grain is not obtrusive. It’s just there, rendering the overall image very film-like by design. As de Bont has supervised this new 4K remaster, he has also made some minor adjustments that were not a part of the original theatrical release. A green caste has been added to the first tornado sequence. It’s also promoted on Warner’s lackluster cover art. The ‘green’ is in keeping with Mother Nature. Most of us have lived through at least one ‘green-skied’ summer storm. It’s not pretty. But the theatrical prints did not favor green. The 4K does.  

For some, the loss of the earlier 2.0 and 5.1 DTS audio tracks may be lamentable. But they’ve been replaced herein with a staggeringly aggressive Dolby Atmos mix that will really give your home theater set-up a workout. Now, not all of the original bonus content has been included for this 4K upgrade. The History Channel’s doc, as well as theatrical trailers are gone. There’s a new, but brief – and not terribly engaging – interview with Jan de Bont. Given his expertise, this piece makes short shrift of it in a way that’s very disappointing. As for the rest. It’s here. De Bont and Stefen Fangmeier’s audio commentary, four featurettes covering the making of the movie, totaling just over an hour, and, Van Halen’s ‘Humans Being’ music video. Aside: I’ve always wondered why Shania Twain’s ‘No One Needs to Know’ music video never made any of the cuts, especially since her warbling of the song was interpolated with actual scenes from Twister. Bottom line: for fans, Twister in 4K is definitely the way to go. It rectifies most of the sins and atrocities of earlier Blu-ray releases and offers up an earth-thundering Atmos mix besides. Aside: I sure wish Warner would do something with ‘cover art’. Even the original posters for Twister were boring. But this 4K cover is just ugly – period! Otherwise, recommended!

FILM RATING (out of 5 – 5 being the best)

3.5

VIDEO/AUDIO

4.5

EXTRAS

3