Twister is a 1996 American disaster adventure film starring Bill Paxton (The Extreme) and Helen Hunt as storm chasers researching tornadoes. It was directed by Jan de Bont from a screenplay by Michael Crichton and Anne-Marie Martin. Its executive producers were Steven Spielberg, Walter Parkes, Laurie MacDonald and Gerald R. Molen. Twister was the second-highest-grossing film of 1996 domestically, with an estimated 54,688,100 tickets sold in the US.
In the film, a team of storm chasers tries to perfect a data-gathering instrument, designed to be released into the funnel of a tornado, while competing with another better-funded team with a similar device during a tornado outbreak across Oklahoma. The plot is a dramatized view of research projects like VORTEX of the NOAA. The device used in the movie, called "Dorothy", is copied from the real-life TOTO, used in the 1980s by NSSL.
Video Twister (1996 film)
Plot
In June 1969, 5-year-old Jo Thornton, her parents and their dog Toby seek shelter in their storm cellar from an F5 tornado in Oklahoma. The tornado ends up ripping the cellar door off, and pulling Jo's father into the storm to his death. Jo, her mother and Toby survive.
In the spring of 1996, 32-year-old Jo, now a meteorologist, is reunited with her estranged husband, Bill "The Extreme" Harding, a former weather researcher and storm chaser who has accepted a job as a TV meteorologist. Bill and his fiancee, reproductive psychiatrist Melissa Reeves, have tracked down Jo during an active bout of stormy weather to obtain her signature on divorce papers. Jo has built four identical tornado research devices called DOROTHY (a reference to the tornado in The Wizard of Oz), based on Bill's designs. Each device is designed to release hundreds of sensors into a tornado to study its interior structure and help develop an advanced storm-warning system. Bill and Melissa join Jo and her storm chaser team. They encounter Dr. Jonas Miller, a smug, corporate-funded meteorologist and storm chaser. While at a truck stop, Bill discovers that Jonas has created a device based on DOROTHY, called DOT-3, and agrees to help Jo deploy DOROTHY before Miller can deploy DOT-3 and claim credit for the idea. They set out in their storm-chasing vehicles to find the first tornado.
Bill and Jo head into the path of an increasingly powerful F1 tornado while riding Jo's truck. On their way, the truck reaches at a high speed. Moments later the radio warns that the funnel is becoming thick and moving faster. When the dirt road they are on suddenly becomes a mud bank, Bill loses control of the truck and they crash into a small bridge. They scramble to take shelter under the bridge as the tornado passes over them, destroying the truck and DOROTHY I before dissipating. By the time the F1 dissipates, Jo's truck lands upside-down, barely missing Melissa who is driving Bill's new truck. Bill and Jo continue storm chasing in Bill's truck, with Melissa riding in the back. The team locates a second tornado, a confirmed F2. When it shifts course, Bill, Jo and Melissa drive through heavy rain and collide with two violent waterspouts. They see some cows flying and the truck spins around until the waterspouts dissipate. No one is hurt, but Melissa, who has never experienced anything remotely similar, is hysterical.
The team visits Jo's Aunt Meg in Wakita, Oklahoma, a small town south of the Kansas border. Inside Meg's house, they take a break and enjoy a homemade meal. Bill tells Melissa about his relationship with Jo and reflects on her father's death. After the storm chasers finish their break, they say goodbye to Meg and they are on their way to their next twister.
An F3 tornado has formed near some hills, but the team has trouble finding it. Jo drives ahead to intercept it, but a telephone pole falls on the back of the truck and knocks DOROTHY II out of it, scattering its mini-sensors. As Jo scrambles to collect the sensors, the tornado lifts and touches down closer. Bill forces her back into the truck and drives them to safety. They confront each other over their marriage and Jo's obsession with tornadoes, which stems from her lingering grief over her father's death.
In Wakita the following night, an F4 tornado demolishes a drive-in movie theater during the showing the 1980 horror film The Shining that Jo and Bill are watching, forcing the other storm chasers to take shelter in a garage warehouse pit. The garage is severely damaged and several people are injured. Emergency personnel arrive to assist the injured. After the ordeal, Melissa recognizes Jo's and Bill's unresolved feelings for one another and amicably ends her engagement to Bill. The team learns that the tornado is on its way toward Wakita. They rush into town, where they find many of the buildings devastated. Some people lost their homes from the horrific twister. The storm chasers continue their investigation until they see Aunt Meg's house destroyed. Bill and Jo rescue Aunt Meg and her dog Mose from her collapsed house. Meg is taken to the nearest hospital with minor injuries while Mose stays with the group. They learn that a maximum-force tornado, an F5, is forming 25 miles to the south. They have two more DOROTHYs to deploy. After completing the twister, they will no longer have more. Jo notices some of Meg's kinetic sculptures revolving in the breeze, and realizes that if they added wind flaps to DOROTHY's sensors, their increased buoyancy would make them more likely to be carried up into a tornado.
While the team is on their way to the F5, they gather empty soft-drink cans, cut them into aluminum sheets, and make spinning fins that they attach to each small sensor sphere so that they look like a helicopter. Reaching the tornado, Bill and Jo drive toward its funnel, but as they near it, a tree trunk drops out of the sky, destroys DOROTHY III, and wedges itself under the truck. With the twister bearing down on them, Bill manages to drive clear of the tree just as a flying fuel tanker hits the ground and explodes near it. Meanwhile, Jonas attempts to deploy DOT-3 by driving ahead of the storm, ignoring Bill's repeated warnings that it is about to shift direction. When it does, Jonas and his driver are killed, and their truck and DOT-3 destroyed. Bill and Jo drive past the last tornado and a shed when DOROTHY IV is loaded onto the back of Bill's truck and is tightly secured onto its bed. Bill and Jo doggedly pursue the storm, dodging flying farm vehicles, and crashing through part of a farmhouse that tumbles into the road. Jo and Bill are able to deploy the last DOROTHY into the final tornado successfully, using Bill's truck as an anchor before leaping onto the cornfield. After DOROTHY's sensors are released and dispersed into the F5, transmitting copious data is sent to the research team's computers. But then, the tornado shifts course toward Bill and Jo. They climb up a hill and enter a pump house and strap themselves to the deeply-anchored pipes. They hold on tight to their harnesses to avoid death. The tornado destroys the building around them and lifts Jo and Bill off of their feet, but they remain securely lashed to the pipes due to their heavy weight. Despite their peril, their faces show wonder as they witness the terrible beauty of the storm's monumental heart and experience the wind that is forceful as a roller coaster. The storm passes over them, then begins to dissipate, and they survive the last twister.
As the F5 dissipates, a family exits their storm cellar. The team celebrates their accomplishment and Jo and Bill decide to form their own lab to analyze the new data, and to give their marriage another try.
Maps Twister (1996 film)
Cast
Production
Twister was produced by Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment, with financial backing from Warner Bros. and Universal Pictures. In return, Warner Bros. was given the North American distribution rights while Universal's joint venture distribution company UIP got the international distribution. The original concept and 10-page tornado-chaser story were presented to Amblin Entertainment in 1992 by screenwriter Jeffrey Hilton. Steven Spielberg then 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.
After spending more than half a year of pre-production on Godzilla, director Jan De Bont left the project after a dispute over its budget, and quickly signed on for Twister.
The production was plagued with problems. Joss Whedon was brought in to do rewrites through the early spring of 1995. When he got bronchitis, Steve Zaillian was brought in. Whedon returned and worked on revisions right through the start of shooting in May 1995, then left the project after getting married. Two weeks into production, Jeff Nathanson was flown in to the set and worked on the script until principal photography ended.
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, 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 forgot not to stand up so quickly. 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 De Bont was "out of control", left the shoot 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 who missed a cue, Burgess and his crew walked off the set, much to the shock of the cast. They remained one more week until Jack N. Green's crew agreed to replace them. Two days before the end of filming, Green was injured when a hydraulic house set, 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 appear in another season of 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. De Bont insisted on using multiple cameras, which led to the exposure of 1.3 million feet of film, compared to the usual maximum of 300,000 feet.
De Bont claims that Twister cost close to $70 million, with $2-3 million going 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. Warner Bros. moved up the film's release date from May 17 to 10, to give it two weekends before Mission: Impossible opened.
Twister is known for its successful product placement, featuring a Dodge Ram pickup truck and several other new vehicle models.
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.
Soundtrack
Twister featured both a traditional orchestral film score by Mark Mancina and several rock music songs, including an instrumental theme song composed and performed for the film by Van Halen. The film's music was released on compact disc.
Twister: Music from the Motion Picture Soundtrack
- Van Halen - "Humans Being"
- Rusted Root - "Virtual Reality"
- Tori Amos - "Talula" (BT's Tornado Mix)
- Alison Krauss - "Moments Like This"
- Mark Knopfler - "Darling Pretty"
- Soul Asylum - "Miss This"
- Belly - "Broken"
- k.d. lang - "Love Affair"
- Lisa Loeb & Nine Stories - "How"
- Red Hot Chili Peppers - "Melancholy Mechanics"
- Goo Goo Dolls - "Long Way Down" (Remix)
- Shania Twain - "No One Needs to Know"
- Element Ethan & 666 - "Downward Spiral" (Remix)
- Stevie Nicks & Lindsey Buckingham - "Twisted"
- Edward & Alex Van Halen - "Respect the Wind"
There is also some other music, such as Deep Purple's "Child in Time" (heard when the team takes the road at the beginning and the assistant maxes the volume in his truck).
The song queued up on a TV in Dusty's van is Eric Clapton's "Motherless Child".
Twister: Motion Picture Score
- Oklahoma: Wheatfield
- Oklahoma: Where's My Truck?
- Oklahoma: Futility
- Oklahoma: Downdraft
- It's Coming: Drive In
- It's Coming: The Big Suck
- The Hunt: Going Green (feat. Trevor Rabin on guitar)
- The Hunt: Sculptures
- The Hunt: Cow
- The Hunt: Ditch
- The Damage: Wakita
- Hailstorm Hill: Bob's Road
- Hailstorm Hill: We're Almost There
- F5: Dorothy IV
- F5: Mobile Home
- F5: God's Finger
- Other: William Tell Overture/Oklahoma Medley
- Other: End Title/Respect the Wind - written by Edward and Alex Van Halen
There are some orchestrated tracks that were in the movie but were not released on the orchestral score, most notably the orchestrated intro to "Humans Being" from when Jo's team left Wakita to chase the Hailstorm Hill tornado. Other, lesser-known tracks omitted include an extended version of "Going Green" (when we first meet Jonas) and a short track from when the first tornado is initially spotted.
Twister: Expanded Archival Collection
In January 2017, La-La Land Records released a limited edition remastered and expanded album containing Mark Mancina's entire score plus four additional tracks.
- Wheatfield (Film Version)
- The Hunt Begins
- The Sky
- Dorothy IV (Film Version)
- The First Twister
- In the Ditch / Where's My Truck?
- Waterspouts
- Cow
- Walk in the Woods
- Bob's Road
- Hail No!
- Futility (Film Version)
- Drive-in Twister
- Wakita (Film Version)
- Sculptures (Film Version)
- House Visit
- The Big Suck (Film Version)
- End Title
- Wheatfield (Alternate)
- Waterspouts (Alternate)
- The Big Suck (Alternate)
- End Title / Respect the Wind
Reception
Critical response
As of March 2013, the film held a 57% score at Rotten Tomatoes based on 53 reviews. The critical consensus stated "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." As of March 2013, it held a score of 68 at Metacritic, indicating "generally favorable reviews".
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 uptempo and exuberant as a roller-coaster ride, neatly avoiding the idea of real danger". 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". 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 $41,059,405 from 2,414 total theaters, making it the number-one movie at the North American box office. It went on to earn a total of $241,721,524 at the North American box office. As of November 2012, it has earned a worldwide total of $494,471,524. It currently sits at number 76 on the all-time North American box office charts. Worldwide it sits at number 105 on the all-time earners list, not adjusted for inflation. It was the second-highest-grossing film of 1996 after Independence Day.
Awards
Urban legends
On May 24, 1996, a tornado destroyed Screen #3 at the Can-View Drive-In, a drive-in theater in Thorold, Ontario, which was scheduled to show the movie Twister later that evening, in a real-life parallel to a scene in the film in which a tornado destroys a drive-in during a showing of the film The Shining. The facts of this incident were exaggerated into an urban legend that the theater was actually playing Twister during the tornado.
On May 10, 2010, a tornado struck Fairfax, Oklahoma, destroying the farmhouse where numerous scenes in Twister were shot. J. Berry Harrison, the owner of the home and a former Oklahoma state senator, commented that the tornado appeared eerily similar to the fictitious one in the film. He had lived in the home since 1978.
Theme park attraction
The film was used as the basis for the attraction Twister...Ride It Out at Universal Studios Florida, which features filmed introductions by Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt. The attraction opened on May 4, 1998 and closed on November 2, 2015 to make way for Race Through New York Starring Jimmy Fallon.
See also
- Into the Storm - A "spiritual successor" to Twister
- 1999 Oklahoma tornado outbreak
References
External links
- Twister on IMDb
- Twister at AllMovie
- Twister at Rotten Tomatoes
- Twister Museum Wakita, Oklahoma
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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