Thoughts on Twister

 

via Gfycat

"The 'Suck Zone.' ... It's the point ... at which basically the twister sucks you up. That's not the technical term for it, obviously."

It's time once again, readers, for Thoughts On in its purest from. Here's the best of my notes from having watched Twister again for the first time in at least 20 years.

1. Way too much time teasing us with the idea of whether or not Toby the Toto-esque dog will survive, especially since he's only there for the one sequence. For that matter, so is Jo's mother. Jo could have easily be the child of widower or otherwise single farmer. Anyway, bye, dad!

2. They didn't even try to make the establishing shot of the NSSL satellite in orbit look like anything other than repurposed stock animation, did they?

3. ROUSING SCORE TIME! Get used to lots of sweeping shots showing people driving. To be fair, the characters are literally chasing tornados across Oklahoma. It's not like they're in a city with easy to identify landmarks that may or may not get destroyed.

4. Oof, Jami Gertz is trying too hard with Melissa's drawl.

5. Close call, but I think I'm going to declare Helen Hunt the winner in her "Here's our star, folks!" battle of the introductions with Bill Paxton. He gets the camera sweeping down to him, but she gets the camera panning up to her.

6. Jo's leading a team of nine storm trackers (10 once Bill inevitably returns). Quick, name any of them other than Dusty (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and "Alan Ruck"? Twister often gets mentioned as part of the disaster movie revival, but here's where it's different than any Airport, Earthquake or Irwin Allen's movies. You wouldn't get so many nondescript people all at once.

7. On the other hand, it's always smart to build a disaster movie around a pair, usually but not exclusively a couple (see also, Burt Lancaster & Dean Martin, Paul Newman & Steve McQueen, Bruce Willis & Ben Affleck). I don't mind that Twister for playing all the beats of the contrived "Bill needs Jo to finish signing the divorce papers" plot element. On the other-other hand, what, did he and Melissa have a wedding date already? Was she pregnant?

"Boy oh boy. New job. New truck. New wife. ... It's like a whole new you."

8. The Usual Gang of Idiots at MAD ran "Twit-sters" a few months after Twister's relief. I've never forgotten their take on Bill vs. Jonas (Cary Elwes) over Dorothy and DOT. Some yokels comment that it's (paraphrased) "two guys fighting over something that looks like R2-D2." For those keeping score, Jo built four Dorothy machines to gather data from inside an active tornado while Jonas is apparently on his third DOT.

9. "... 'Cause the days of sniffing the dirt are over." "Better that what you sniff."

10. Alan Ruck, you are rocking those bangs!

11. Product Placement No. 1: Pennzoil. Product Placement No. 2: Pepsi.

12. I didn't expect to be slightly moved by Bill preparing for the next storm. I had "divining" in my notes, but that's not quite right, since he isn't blindly guessing. Either way, the scene's something that feels just right for the type of movie Twister is. (More on that as we progress.)

13. On the other hand, calling Bill a "human barometer" sounds stupid.

14. "You're still in love with him, aren't you?" Fifty points for Melissa for almost immediately getting a clue. We're just over 23 minutes into Twister and maybe about that time in-universe. Alas, Melissa's got nowhere else to go but down. To her credit, though, she never devolves into a bitch.

15. Show of hands, who all anticipated the gag of Melissa leaving her and Bill's lemonade atop the truck, with it falling off as she joins the convoy?

16. We're nearly a half-hour in, time to see a funnel cloud!

17. "I want to see it! I want to see it!" Okay, crazy lady with unresolved grief and daddy issues ...

via Syfy

18. There really is a narm charm to Melissa's in-universe over the top (but completely normal in reality) reactions to the danger she's placed in. "Twit-sters" had the slightly cruel gag of the Jo analog gathering materials to repair a machine. She's not using duct tape for that, but to tape Melissa's mouth.

19. At 78 minutes to go, we've lost one Dorothy. Next half-hour, next round of storm chasing.

20. If it's not obvious, I've been pretty forgiving of the character of Melissa. But I can't stand her counseling Donald and Julia while all hell's breaking loose. First of all, it's too contrived. Second of all, I guess she has a magic phone. Finally, there's no button to the gag. We need something like Melissa shouting, "Oh, just fuck your wife already!"

21. Forty-two minutes in, we have The Cow. Twister doesn't have many deaths in general. There's Jo's dad and later Jonas and Eddie (Zach Grenier). The chickens at Jo's family farm may have survived and we know that Toby, Aunt Meg's dog and those last pair of horses did. I guess The Cow is supposed to stand in for all the animals that would have been killed during all those storms.

22. I love Aunt Meg (Lois Smith) to pieces! I would watch a whole movie about her life as a farmer and folk artist. "Twit-sters" again: the cow she served died after flying into one of her sculptures.

23. Pepsi Product Placement No. 2.

24. IMDB tells me that Tom Hanks and Laura Dern nearly played Bill and Jo. By 1996, it would have been hard to buy Hanks as a guy who'd encounter a tornado while naked and throw a bottle of Jack Daniels into its path. Sorry, but true.

25. "Is there an F5?" The moment of immediate silence is screaming for a dramatic chord.

26. Fifty-two minutes into the movie, time for storm No. 3. Not a bad one to end Act III (of sorts) with. We've got Dorothy II failing ("Twit-sters" yet again: "I lost my balls!" "So did I! That's why I want to be a wimpy weatherman."), Melissa declaring they're all crazy and that Jo's the craziest and Bill simultaneously exorcising Jo's demons and saving their marriage. I like Jo/Helen Hunt, but seriously, Melissa didn't deserve to have her heart broken like that.

27. The "you're all crazy!" outburst made me think of Sarah Jessica Parker's last scene in Ed Wood. If you haven't guessed by now, I spent a good part of Twister imagining an alternative version. How might the movie have looked if it was a Michael Bay or Roland Emmerich project rather than a Jan de Bont? Suppose instead of Hunt, Paxton, Gertz and Hoffman, we had Demi Moore, Kevin Costner, Parker (or an actual southerner not yet back on the A-list, Julia Roberts) and either Garth Brooks (who turned down the role or Dusty, according to IMDB) or Harry Connick, Jr? In my version, Melissa and Dusty end up together. Also, at least one of Jo's crew actually dies.

28. Pepsi Product Placement No. 3.

29. Sixty-eight minutes in, tornado No. 4. The drive-in's destroyer, Preacher (Scott Thomson) nearly gets decapitated by that hubcap and Melissa leaves with her head held high in the aftermath. "Twit-sters" yet again: Aunt Meg isn't at all injured when the storm reached Wakita. With all the red meat, eggs, potatoes and gravy Meg eats, she's being treated for high cholesterol!

30. Pepsi Product Placement No. 4.

31. Okay, folks, time for the finale. Tornado No. 5. (Insert your own Lou Bega joke.) As much as Twister differed from conventional disaster movies, it still followed pacing rules. Ninety minutes in, we get the fuel truck carried away. Ninety-three minutes in, Jonas and Eddie die. Ninety-four minutes in, the fuel truck lands and explodes, followed by the falling farm implements and then into the house. And, oh boy, does the truck going through the house look like an obvious model when seeing it in 2021.

32. Time to launch Dorothy IV ... and for Jo and Bill to get the hell out of there already!

33. Some shots haven't aged well, but I really am still impressed by the sight of Jo and Bill running amid all that debris.

34. How the hell did neither Jo nor Bill have dislocated legs after being sent into the air like that?

35. Hello, random safe farm family. Hello, horses that survived for God knows whatever reason. Hello, renewed relationship between Jo and Bill, with the kiss coming just before the credits. For the record, Hunt's credit was before Paxton's. "Twit-sters" had the Wizard of Oz ending with Hunt waking up on the Mad About You set. Paul Reiser's babbling has her wanting to fall back asleep until her reminds her of the benefits of not doing a stressful movie. "There's no place like TV, there's no place like TV ..."