They Don’t Make Disaster Movies Like Twister Anymore

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I saw the original Twister (1996) the night it opened, at the then–relatively new AMC Lincoln Square (which back then was known as the Sony Lincoln Square). And I hated it. The dialogue was ham-handed, the performances stiff, the villain lame, the story stupid. The effects were pretty good, however, but back then we didn’t like movies simply because the effects were good. The CGI revolution (inaugurated by Terminator 2: Judgment Day and the first Jurassic Park several years earlier) was already upon us, and we just took it as a given that the effects would be good in these expensive Hollywood blockbusters. For years, Twister was my go-to example of how some of the action hits we lionized from the 1980s and ’90s weren’t actually all that great. (Also not great: Independence Day.) When I did my initial list of the Greatest Disaster Films of All Time, I left it off Twister — much to some readers’ consternation.

But then something strange happened: I started to think of it more fondly. After all, it starred the late Bill Paxton, who was pretty great in everything else, and Helen Hunt, who would go on to win an Oscar not long after for 1997’s As Good As It Gets. Plus that supporting cast, which featured people like Philip Seymour Hoffman and Todd Field. Surely the movie was better than I remembered it? It helped that my young son was going through an extended tornado phase in the early 2010s, so I wound up rewatching Twister more than the average adult might have expected to.

Then, in 2020, Vulture did a Friday Night Movie Club livetweet of the film, and I interviewed director Jan de Bont for that package. We had a fun and wide-ranging discussion, but what struck me was that de Bont himself seemed somewhat dissatisfied with the picture. He lamented that he didn’t fight the studio harder when they insisted on more exposition in the script: “The film has a lot of establishing scenes, a lot of exposition scenes,” he told me. “To me, that makes a movie almost immediately less interesting. I said, ‘No, that will kill the movie. You don’t have to explain everything.’” Exactly, I thought, quietly. Part of the clunkiness of the movie lay in its attempts to explain itself. “[I felt] that the dialogue had to be moving forward and energized in the same pattern as the action. If you don’t do that, it gets very stilted very quickly,” de Bont said.

Twister is … let’s say … a flawed film. The script, by Michael Crichton (who was a terrific novelist but a mostly lousy screenwriter) and Anne-Marie Martin, is shallow and awkward. But now I feel the movie basically works, mainly thanks to the immediacy de Bont brought to it. On both his directorial debut, Speed (which does rule), and the Hollywood films on which he served as cinematographer (including Die Hard, The Hunt for Red October, and Basic Instinct), de Bont liked to push his camera up close to his actors to capture very real emotions in sometimes extreme physical circumstances. That was one of the reasons why he tended to put actors in situations where they might fear for their lives, at least a little bit. He told me that on Speed he had Sandra Bullock actually drive the bus — it wasn’t being towed by a camera rig or anything like that. (Relax, there was a safety driver perched atop the bus to make sure nothing untoward happened. But at any given moment, the actors didn’t know which of the two was actually controlling the vehicle.) “What you achieve is that the people on the bus, all the extras, too, they feel like, ‘Man, we all are on our own here,’” de Bont said. “The reactions are so real, and that energizes almost everything immediately.”

Twister does have its share of CGI, but a lot of the effects were practically done. That’s another reason why it holds up — and maybe seems better today than it did back then. It’s not that CGI is bad. (It’s not when it’s done well, and treated by filmmakers as an essential part of the production process, instead of a we’ll-fix-it-in-post afterthought.) What we’re responding to in a lot of those action films from the ’80s and ’90s has to do with the urgency and texture captured by practical effects and real actors — real people — having real responses to what they’re interacting with. The best directors working today in the blockbuster realm understand this and do everything they can to try to capture a similar sense of authenticity.

Is Lee Isaac Chung, an Oscar nominee and the man behind the new Twisters, one of those directors? I’m not sure yet. Twisters does have some of the trappings of an older action movie. It was also shot on film, so you can immediately feel the texture and depth even in the movie’s most mundane shots. Plus it features a delightful turn by Glen Powell, maybe the only major actor in the movie who got the memo that this is supposed to be an endearingly stupid sequel to an endearingly stupid original. (You can read my appreciation of the actor here.) I do mostly agree with my colleague Alison Willmore when she says, in her review: “It’s not a throwback, but it doesn’t feel like an imaginative update on the original, either. If Twister is the thrifted mall find, Twisters is the sweatshirt made by the DTC brand that touts its use of century-old manufacturing processes on Instagram with a fit that is universally unflattering.”

But then there’s this: When I first saw Twisters, in preparation for my Glen Powell essay, the effects were unfinished. I mean, really unfinished — a couple of scenes were basically just animated. There, the vapidness of the plot and the weak central performance by Daisy Edgar-Jones really stood out. Later, however, I saw the film with finished effects and was duly transported. In fact, I sort of can’t wait to see it again, in IMAX. After some soul-searching on my part, Twister ultimately made my updated list of the Greatest Disaster Movies of All Time. Will Twisters? For now, no. But ask me again in 20 years.