Twister

I was tempted to review the absolutely genius floor based game of balance and flexibility; I think I really should have. It would have been more fun than watching this non-entity of a movie.

There's about 4 things I like in this movie.

1. The flying cow

2. Philip Seymour Hoffman who is giving the kind of performance that makes a lot more sense knowing the circumstances of his death. 3. A scene where a tornado is coming for a drive-in movie theatre showing The Shining and just as Jack Nicholson hacks away at the door with an axe in that famous scene, little bits of the screen disappear due to the tornado.

4. Near the end as the 2 protagonists try to outrun the tornado they run into a barn full of all sorts of blades - they quickly 'nope out.'

That's it.

The rest of the movie is some bland wannabe Spielberg bullshit. Helen Hunt is miscast, she just seems way too boring as an actress to be a storm chaser. Bill Paxton isn't much better, acting with the subtlety of a lump hammer. Both leads look like they were cast because if you squint at them when they're standing together they kind of look like the leads from Jurassic Park. In fact I'm pretty sure the pitch for this movie was 'Jurassic Park but we replace the dinosaurs with tornadoes.' But it doesn't even copy Spielberg well.

The plot consists of some tornado hunters doing the same thing 4 times and finally succeeding, with minor attention paid to a perfectly descent love interest who Bill Paxton essentially only uses to make his ex jealous and win her back. Beside the two leads the rest of the gang of tornado hunters look like they all might have restraining orders from going near any playgrounds. Maybe they met at a group meeting.

The score sounds like someone asked a shitty composer to replicate John Williams and the shitty composer failed. It's completely forgettable without coming close to even having what you might call a 'theme.' Generic sounding 90s songs are heard occasionally but only ever serve to further date the film.

I think Twister was one of the films they included on the promotion reel for DVDs when they were first a thing, and I get it - I'm sure the special effects were great for the time and throwing so much shit at the screen sure seems exciting, but a lot of the effects really don't hold up (I'm thinking of a satellite orbiting Earth early on in the film that looks like a piece of clip art) and the torrent of debris gets pretty boring pretty quick.

It's truly a relic of the 90s but it's not like things have gotten any better for the genre - at least the tornadoes in this film don't contain sharks and it's not like mankind's only hope for stopping the severe weather is Gerard Butler punching it. Then again maybe those things might made this a little less bland.

2 mehs out of 5.