| 8 YEAR LATE MOVIE REVIEWS, VOLUME ONE: TWISTER
(Disclaimer: What follows is my extremely overlong analysis of the mental diarrhea that is the 1996 film, Twister . Get out now if you're not interested in a couple of pages of scathing hatred and vicious sarcasm directed rather psychotically towards an all but forgotten summer blockbuster of years past.)
In my Weather and Climate Lab yesterday, the teacher once again filled our minds with copious amounts of intriguing information, ideas coalescing and moving about like so many cumulonimbus clouds. Rather than taking the conventional route however, this genius of educational progressivism decided that the best way for us to learn about tornados would be . . . to watch the film Twister. This is higher education, people, be awed.
For those of you who are unaware, Twister is a film starring Bill Paxton (an actor who really should have done us all a favor by sticking to roles such as the absolutely sensational "Punk Leader" in the original Terminator and the star of the surreal music video for Barnes and Barnes' "Fish Heads", arguably his finest work) and Helen Hunt (who peaked, appropriately enough, with As Good As It Gets) about two stormchasers (!) who also happen to be former lovers (!!) and also happen to be brought together in the end through their passion for their work (!!!) and each other (!!!!). Twister is brought to us by writers Michael Crichton (who aside from the overrated textbook that is Jurassic Park wrote not only Disclosure, but also Timeline!!!) and Anne-Marie Martin (whose claim to "fame" is having played Clea in a Dr. Strange pilot in the '70s; though, all things considered, I suppose her claim to fame is probably writing Twister) as well as director Jan de Bont (whose work includes Speed 2: Cruise Control, The Haunting, and Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life). So, if you haven't guessed by now, seeing Twister is quite the treat!
From the beginning, you know you are entering into a sort of inane, purgatorial dimentia as the movie opens with several scenes of the Tazmanian Devil twisting (get it?) about, causing various levels of destruction. After a few scenes of destructive twisting (see? see?) the Devil stops, and slobbers and spits about, as Bugs Bunny stands disgusted and aghast and exclaims: "Yeeeaauuugh!" (An admirably self-conscious move by de Bont, as this entire exchange deftly sums up the interaction between the film and its audience.) De Bont's decision to open the film with a cartoon which has only the thinnest connotative relation to the film itself is truly in step with the great filmmakers of all time. Take Orson Welles, for example, who prefaced Citizen Kane with a clip of Rodney Dangerfield repeating "I get no respect" over and over; or Francis Coppola, with his epigramatic clip of a cartoon devil stealing a lollipop from an infant in Apocalypse Now!
After two more prefaces (one which incorrectly defines the word "twister" as any "destructive force" and one which introduces a group of stressed-out National Weather Service analysts with all of the subtle characterization of a minstrel show) the action finally starts! And by action, I mean pain. Head-rending, bowel-splitting pain. In another preface, a young girl and her family are rushed from their small farmhouse into a storm cellar during a . . . wait for it . . . TWISTER! After a truly original and unique cinematic moment in which the audience is made to feel sympathy for a small dog (just before a man with a tall hat and moustache ties Helen Hunt to the train tracks) the little girl's father is sucked out of the shelter and into the TWISTER (!!!!) while fighting with all of his life to keep the door shut. The audience is saddened, no doubt because the father's death is in vain: the door is unneccesary; had he walked five feet to where the women were standing instead of attempting to keep it shut, he would have lived, just as they did. This scene of course conveys the emotional force behind Helen Hunt's quest against . . . ummm . . . doors? No, wait! TWISTERS!!!! (This is a sticking point for me, as Helen has this insane obsession with learning about tornados. I may as well jump ahead and say that the McGuffin of the film is "Dorothy" (GET IT?!?!?!?!), a device which will measure tornados for the first time and improve warning systems by 13 MINUTES!!!! The problem is, none of the events which motivate Helen Hunt to STOP TORNADOES ONCE AND FOR ALL would be any different if earlier warnings were given. An early warning wouldn't have saved her father, since it wouldn't have moved the path of the tornado which killed him; the end result would have been their going into the cellar earlier, and missing about 13 minutes of good television before their patriarch's untimely death. Later, the "quirky aunt" character who makes steak and eggs and "wind-art" like any good quirky aunt should, is struck by a tornado which destroys her house, but leaves her unscathed. Her cries that "we had no warning!" fall flat on any intelligent persons ears, as an early warning would have had no effect on the situation: she would still be alive, and the house would still be destroyed. So, the movie's entire emotional drive is bankrupt and Joe comes off as simply insane, and not even dangerously so, just annoyingly so. Maybe de Bont and Crichton are going for a more existential theme here...)
Cut to 20 or so years later. It seems that Bill (played by Bill Paxton; creative) has come to rendezvouz with his former "stormchasing" team to get a signature for his divorce papers from ex-wife Joe (Helen Hunt, who is a tomboy, and not your typical woman, as we see when she uses a screwdriver and wears pants and forgets to don her bonnet and churn the day's butter and get raped by an "Injun"). We quickly meet Twister's desparately quirky cast of characters, including Dusty, a COMPLETE WEIRDO!!! characterized by his TWISTY STRAWS (?!?!?!) and love for . . . are you ready? . . . this is weird . . . ERIC CLAPTON!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Other strange individuals (all with great nicknames that no one would ever incur in real life) include "Preacher" who listens to classical music (which puts him at odds with Dusty, let me tell you!) has a goatee and says alledgedly ominous things like "the finger of God" about tornados, and "Rabbit" who has maps and . . . oh, who cares; they all talk about tornados as if they're comic books and love to eat steak and scream while driving.
The movie pretty much proceeds in this fashion: the group finds a TWISTER (!) and they embark upon chasing it; Bill makes some crazy but instinctive choice about the twisters behavior, such as "It's going left"; someone spouts some glaringly out of place Twister-lingo such as "we've got sisters" (TWO tornados, you see) or "it's a sidewinder" (a twister which moves...sideways?); our heroes are taunted by the bad guys (that's right, bad guys; early in the film Bill gets into a near fist-fight with Cary Elwes, a former colleague who not only stole the "Dorothy" design, but has several black cars and men in nice clothes instead of a hodge-podge assortment of wacky fellows in station wagons and RVs; of course, in the end, he gets what he deserves for being slightly mean, well dressed, and boring when A RADIO TOWER IS DRIVEN THROUGH HIS PARTNER'S HEAD AND HE IS CARRIED UP INTO A TORNADO AND DROPPED ONTO THE EARTH BELOW FROM HUNDREDS OF FEET UP . . . an eye for an eye indeed, Mr. Crichton); our heroes show-up the bad guys; Bill has to do something crazy like driving in a ditch, in order to catch the twister; the trick fails; Helen Hunt is reckless; Bill's fiancee says something insufferably inane (such as her expression of extreme surprise that they are still chasing tornados, after her truck has been fitted with a gigantic piece of weather equipment and a caravan of 4 cars follows them while her fiancee talks about where to find a tornado into the CB radio that he inexplicably has even though he supposedly quit storm-chasing); then they all act quirky somewhere until another twister comes.
Suffice to say, in the end Bill and Helen Hunt end up together and Twisters are vanquished for all time when the Dorothy machine works and Helen gets to look inside a Twister to (hopefully) quell her psychosis and (aside from those who have been savagely killed) everyone is happy. Except for me. I'm in rather a lot of pain actually. |
