Written by Brian Thomas
Written by Brian Thomas
 TWISTER Summer movie season blows in - Paxton & Hunt hunt tornadoes -Audiences catch up to be swept awayModern cinema has found its heroes in odd places, but I never thought I'd see a film depicting the hazardous, daredevil lifestyles of courageous meteorologists. Genre favorite Bill Paxton (Aliens, One False Move, Trespass) stars as a reformed wild man seeking to put the past behind him and get his life in order, going from crazed storm-chaser to reserved TV weatherman. After a period of separation, his wife Helen Hunt (TV's Mad About You) knows that they really do belong together. Either consciously or not, she lures him to meet her while on a storm-chasing expedition in Oklahoma, just as a pet project they began together is about to bear fruit. Their experiment, which becomes their goal in the film, is to get a tornado to pop the lid off a specially constructed device that looks like a garbage can, and eat up hundreds of little sensors that look like Christmas tree ornaments. We're assured that somehow this will save thousands of lives. Just take Bill and Helen's word for it - explaining it would slow down the action. And there's action aplenty - Hunt and her band of eccentric assistants are lucky enough to be hunting tornadoes just as the biggest stormline in history is developing. Every few minutes, a big, noisy twister shows up to tear up the scenery, throwing around farm equipment and threatening to mess up everyone's hair, with Hunt and Paxton braving the many perils at the heart of the storm. The film is chock full from beginning to end with awesome spectacle - some of the best special effects footage ever created - along with some mighty impressive stunt driving. Between his sexy ex, the big wind, and the schemes of an evil rival meteorologist to steal his idea, it's no wonder that Paxton gets swept away. Hunt's motivation for storm chasing comes from her childhood experience with an "F5" strength tornado - among the most powerful ever detected. Ever since, she's been after the twister that killed her paw. Paxton's motivations are murkier. If he's simply a thrill seeker, it seems odd that he would have chosen to become a research scientist. Another mystery is why his fiancee (Jami Gertz), who is supposed to be a psychotherapist, would agree to marry him knowing so little about his past. "When you said you chased tornadoes", she complains, "I thought you meant it metaphorically!" Besides these dramatic flaws, the film is rife with missteps in logic (surprising in a film co-written by Michael Crichton, who has a reputation as a stickler for scientific accuracy). Growing up in Midwestern farm country, I had plenty of experience with tornadoes. Out on the plains, it's hard to miss signs of developing storms - they don't sneak up on you like hungry panthers, as they do here. Even people that have never been near a tornado may be puzzled at how Gertz' cellular phone continues to work flawlessly. And how, with windstorms tearing up power lines, there's never a loss of electricity. Neon signs may get smashed and thrown down, but they still light up. And how, with cars and trucks being thrown all around them, our heroes run away from 100 mph winds. But none of this illogic, or the corny psychodrama, really matters because what you really pay your money to see here is the sight of big tornadoes smashing up stuff. At the eye of the storm, Twister is really a good old fashioned monster movie. Every generation breeds movie monsters that bring horrors most palatable to the audience of its time. The gothic fiends of the Great Depression gave way to the atomic spawned nightmares of the post-war years. Audiences of the 1970s laughed at giant insects, but shuddered at demonic possessions and rampaging killer sharks. In the middle '90s, we're still riding on a wave of stalking serial killers that's been building slowly since psycho (and is currently mutating into the lethal masterminds portrayed so well by Kevin Spacey). Crowds will flock to Twister - not to become engrossed in the problems of an estranged marriage, but to see a truly awesome spectacle of destruction. And this is where the film excels. Before coming to this project, director Jan DeBont (Speed) was to direct an American adaptation of the classic Japanese monster film Godzilla, until the studio balked at what DeBont considered the necessary budget. In Twister, we get a fairly clear picture of how he would have handled that film. Here he presents a mysterious, terribly destructive force of nature at its most visually spectacular. His monster howls and roars in fury, tearing up and smashing everything in its path while seemingly pursuing our fleeing heroes. Like the fires in Ron Howard's Backdraft, DeBont's towering funnel clouds are not just obstacles or phenomena, but the story's main characters. When one of the tornadoes heads in the direction of a barn, I'd wager there's not one person who will root for it to miss. Visit the Visit Copyright © 1994-1997 by Virtual Press/Global Internet Solutions. Internet Daily News and its respective columns are trademarks of Virtual Press/Global Internet Solutions. |