Twister (1996)

PG-13 for language, including a hidden f-bomb if you have the subtitles on.  I think the subtitle even pops more if you have a room full of nieces and nephews with your kids watching it on a big screen.  The movie is a disaster movie, which means you are going to have some scary moments involving death, destruction, and blood.  But besides the random language and a radio tower to a guy's face, the movie is more tame than I remember.  PG-13.

DIRECTOR:  Jan de Bont

Yeah!  We watched Twister, just like everyone else in America.  It's right there, sitting on Max.  Nobody's stopping you.  Crank that nonsense on.  We watched in the garage at night with the garage door open.  It was a beautiful night, which felt like a lost opportunity because this movie would have slapped even harder in a thunderstorm.  It's been a minute since I watched this one.  I honestly have more memory of the Universal Studios experience than I actually do that movie, so it was fun coming back to it.  I'll be honest.  As much as I'm a fan of a silent film watching experience, I just had to talk all the way through this movie.  And I'll tell you what.  In this case --IN THIS SPECIFIC CASE --it made the movie better.

Twister is its own thing.  Okay, it's not.  But Twister is both an absolutely terrible forgettable movie and a pretty darned good movie at the same time. Like, it's a dumb movie.  It's almost absurd what goes into this movie.  It's a bunch of dumb, but lovable characters, doing incredibly dumb stuff over and over again.  I get it...partially.  From Jo's perspective, she's doing this for a cause.  She wants to stop what happened to her as a child from happening to anyone else.  But also, like, what?  There's a lot of times where I wonder what the grand plan was.  Okay, I'm just going to go into my major gripe for the movie that I kept shouting out.  Dorothy, the weather system that Bill (Bill Paxton plays a character with whom he shares a name), needs some time to set up.  Sometimes.  SOMETIMES.  The entire plan:  Move this Dorothy unit in front of a tornado and then get out quickly.  Yet, they really dawdle on setting up Dorothy.  (The reason I stressed the "sometimes" bit is that the climax of the movie, Jo just flips a switch and it's good to go.)  (Also, UPDATE!  It's way too late, yet I am deciding to stay up and knock out two potential blogs?  That's stupid, but I'm doing this because my summer is practically over.) So much of the movie is them getting close to a storm, then getting wrecked by that storm because they drove into a storm.  

The crazy part is that the conflict of the movie is almost entirely arbitrary.  Again, this is a dumb fun movie.  The first draft of this movie had to be "We're driving towards that storm."  "Nope, not the right storm."  To fix this, they added scientist bad guys (whom I want to discuss ad nauseum besides the fact that the entire plot device is hilariously dumb) and non-flying sensors.  I'm going to talk about the sensors first because I'm locked into them, but we're going to do our best to turn this around on the scientist bad guys.  The sensors in this movie often get wrecked before they have a chance to get them airborne.  Okay.  Honestly, a lot of that comes down to lack of prep time because the container that the sensors are in gets knocked over all of the time.  The movie doesn't really make clear whether or not the Dorothy container is important to the sensors working.  In some ways, it's kind of like that "Is the Kool-Aid man the glass or the liquid?" meme, only with a Macguffin.  So in one of the rewrites, someone said that the sensors had to be somehow the problem with driving into storms.  So they called up the Pepsi corporation and asked if they wanted to be the reason that people stopped dying in tornados.  I'm not the biggest fan of product placement.  I was going to try and defend myself by pretending that product placement never really bothered me, but between the box of Cheerios in Superman: The Movie and the fact that I can't give Cast Away a reasonable chance, I think I'm pretty anti-product placement.  When Bill said that they need to find as many aluminum cans right now, I called shannigans because there's clearly no recycling plant in a town that just got leveled by a tornado.   But even more insane is that every single one of them was a Pepsi product?  Come on.  Sure, there's a version of the story where Dustin goes into a convenience store and buys out every case of Pepsi, downs a handful and spills a whole bunch into a ditch.  Sure.  But I don't by that.  That doesn't ring true.  Instead, what does ring true is that Warner Brothers got some quick funding from the New Generation to pup Pepsi all over these little sensors.  This bugs me.

Evil Scientists.  I told you they bugged me.  I'll tell you why.  When I was a kid and I saw Twister, this raised no red flags.  After all, Cary Elwes was born to play the sleazy competition in a movie where you kind of have to shut your brain off.  I even get that it is immoral to steal Bill's tech and try to deploy it yourself.  But do you know what doesn't really match this story?  Rushing to see whose tech can get into a tornado first.  Let's imagine that this story went a little bit differently.  After all, Bill didn't know that the F5 for sure was going to drift into Jonas's car.  He suspected that it might have, but he wasn't sure.  And let's say that Jonas got his sensors up into the air before Bill did, despite the fact that Pepsi wasn't sponsoring Jonas's cube drones (which had to fly worse, right?).  Jo's entire internal conflict was about the fact that she needed to pursue the weather to make sure that no other kid had to go through what she went through.  (Oh, I need to talk about Meg's mandate to Jo before I close up!) If Jonas's thing worked, it would have soured a good thing.  But let's remember.  It still would have been a good thing.  The goal was to get information on how tornados worked.  If these storm chasers could have figured out how tornados worked, then people would have been saved.  Yet, a lot of this movie is them almost killing each other trying to get to the tornados first.  Seems kind of morally weird and such an odd choice for an antagonist for a film.

I don't know if I have enough meat on this bone to provide a weighty argument worthy of a blog.  Meg, Jo's aunt, gives Jo a command.  After Meg is almost killed in her house, Jo says that she's going to stay with Meg until she gets better. Meg, aghast as such a prospect, gives her a real Jonathan Kent speech, saying that Jo has a responsibility to stop the F5 that's heading for more of Oklahoma.  I think all of our brains made the leap to "What she meant was that Jo has to finish the job so, in the distant future, tornados could be detected quicker and easier."  What she actually said was something along the lines of "Stopping the tornado." That's not the plot of this movie.  Jo, nor anybody else, really has that kind of power.  Stopping the tornado was never on the docket, Aunt Meg.  But it is one of those rally cries that gets everyone on board.  After all, if Meg, who has just lost everything, tell you to pick yourself up, you gone done pick yourself up.  

I think this might be a '90s thing, but I forgot how much of a romance this was.  It's got some heavy rom-com vibes and formulae to it. Add Dr. Melissa Reeves to the pile of jilted significant others who really didn't deserve what they had coming to them.  Dr. Reeves was there to be supportive.  Yeah, she's a little confrontational.  She's a therapist.  Okay, she's a reproductive therapist, but she's at least trying to start a dialogue with Jo when things get awkward.  Like Jo, she knows to get ahead of the storm so it doesn't take you by surprise.  She does almost nothing wrong, but Bill kind of mentally cheats on her.  Okay, give him points for not actually cheating on her and hooking up with Jo until after Melissa dumps him.  The only actual crime that Melissa did was being too cool with Bill about the entire events of the day.  She really could have vocalized that this behavior was inappropriate early on and that's a bit on her. But she also had some reasonable expectations that Bill would have considered her needs over that of the group. Still, rom com vibes.

As much as I'm teasing this movie, it still kind of slaps. (Oh yeah, the CG is hilariously bad and I fully blame 1996.) This movie is worth it almost entirely for the drive-in movie sequence.  Yeah, I teased it by saying that you can't make a movie better by showing a better movie in the middle of it, but that scene genuinely is incredibly memorable.   But that doesn't mean that the entire movie wasn't dumb.  I read somewhere that Jan de Bont was caught off guard by the announcement of Twisters because he wasn't consulted.  In my head, I started equating Twister to this cinematic masterpiece that couldn't be touched.  I now get why they didn't contact him.  There really was no need to.  This was a movie that hit right and does a lot of the disaster stuff right, but ultimately is a fluff piece that capitalized on the Amblin vibes that we don't really see anymore.  Is it perfect?  Far from it.  Instead, it's just a really good movie to watch in an outdoor theater, as long as you have good speakers.