Twister 1996 - Tumblr Posts
Twister (1996) is the greatest ensemble action movie of all time
I know that is a very strong point to try and make in the age of superhero team-ups, but I’m right and I should say so. Before I rant, it is worth noting that the movie does suffer from a real diversity problem, but that is a topic complicated enough to deserve a second post.
Now, how in Bill Paxton’s good name do I intend to defend this point? Simply put, there are three scenes in this movie that give it more earnest heart and charm than any other ensemble movie in the last few years.
(I’m gonna cut it here so that I don’t clog up your dashboard)
1. Lunch with Aunt Meg. This is everything the farmhouse scene in Avengers: Age of Ultron could have been. This is ten people showing up unannounced at the Team Mom’s house and her welcoming them in because they are all her kids and they need to eat. This is the high school band raiding a Waffle House after a concert or the monthly dart night with the office. There is constant crosstalk at the dinner table, Aunt Meg herself vanishes into the team like something between an honorary member and a de facto leader. In these 7 minutes we get character development for each of the two main leads, we get humor, and we get the setup for one of the most tense action scenes of the entire movie when Meg’s house comes down around her later, and the entire goddamn team does not hesitate to run in after her.
2. F4 at the Drive-In. This scene happens right after the bombshell break between acts 2 and 3. Bill is still in love with Jo, everybody knows, and the narrative weight of that punch is carried in the general silence from the whole cast. There are probably four lines spoken in the setup before the tornado arrives, and three of them are between Jo and a waitress. The cast is scattered and everyone perfectly nails the physical cues of tension and anxiety. Then the tornado hits.
In a lesser movie (I’m looking at you, every Fast and Furious movie ever made), this would be a breaking point where the team is finally pushed to the limit and breaks apart, different groups going different ways only to collide again gloriously in the finale. But no, not here. The team sees imminent danger, a danger they are trained to handle, and they snap back into action like only the best of the best. They go from dazed and disoriented to high-functioning team under pressure like only a well-oiled and loving group can.
3. Where’s Jo? That’s right, the first scene of the entire team together is the real winner here. There is no tension here, there are no stakes. This is the team in it’s natural state: working together. We see the map brothers bantering like my college roommate and I over laundry detergent. We see people fixing equipment and relaxing in the sun, giving advice and shouting comments casually back and forth. The repeated “Bill’s back!” motif doesn’t feel artificial, it feels like welcoming back a friend you haven’t seen in ages. All of this culminates in the big break, with none other than Patty Haynes giving the movie’s only meteorologically accurate line (”we’ve got supercells forming up the dryline!”) before the team snaps into action, and we’re off.
Twister (1996) is a time capsule from the early days of diversity in STEM
That’s right, it’s another Twister post, I’m sure my mutuals must love me. I mentioned in my first Twister post that the movie, for as excellent a film as it is, has a serious lack of representation. This is objectively true.
For one, this movie only barely passes the Bechdel test: a rudimentary test for whether or not a movie has meaningful women characters with a shockingly high failure rate. There are multiple women in this movie, and some of them even have names - the four are Jo, Melissa, Aunt Meg, and Patty Haynes (she sings Oklahoma in the beginning chase scene). There are only three brief scenes where any of these characters talk about something other than Bill, with Melissa and Jo having a short exchange about the Dorothy system, Melissa thanking Aunt Meg in a charmingly awkward scene that arguably has a lot of subtext about how Meg feels about Jo and Bill, and Jo telling Meg to go to the hospital. Aside from that, every time a woman talks to a woman it is about Bill.
Now we get to the constant killer of movies made before 2000: race. From my recollection, there is a single black person in this movie. We see him briefly on Aunt Meg’s TV when the protagonists are rolling out to chase their third tornado of the day. I could go on, but its easier to say he’s an extra.
What does this mean for Twister?
Well, nothing bad if that’s what you were worrying about. It’s always worrying to see a purely white ensemble cast in any American movie, but that’s a modern perspective. Nowadays it is unrealistic for there to be one person of color between two teams of scientists and storm chasers (totaling around 20 people). But if you look back to the 1990s, that’s almost exactly what you would expect. The thing is, that statistic hasn’t even changed all that much, with about the same share of degrees accounting for a group that makes up 13% of the American population.
The story with women is far different though, and puts in perspective that maybe Twister was a little man heavy. In environmental life sciences (a generalization that includes meteorology), women made up about a third of the workforce at the time the movie was released, and they now occupy almost a whole half of the jobs in the field. So maybe we should have seen more than just Jo and Patty as the only women in Oklahoma willing to chase a tornado for science :/
So what do we do now that we have all of this information and context? There’s nothing to do really, save for think conscientiously when you enjoy your favorite tornado-action-flick about how the world looked back then and how it looks now. Think about how while it looks like it’s terribly whitewashed, it’s actually terrifyingly accurate and points to a larger systemic problem.
How would I make Twister more diverse if I were making it today? The funny thing about a movie as ensemble-heavy as this is that the endlessly wonderful cast of storm chasers can be anyone. They don’t have a complicated narrative driven by experiences as black, Asian, or Hispanic Americans, so you could change anyone and hold the story constant. But is that the right thing to do? Usually, no. Diversity for the sake of diversity oftentimes isn’t meaningful. So it wouldn’t be wise to just make Beltzer a woman of color and call it a day, but it would be wise to give her interactions and scenes that show, even in the background like many of the ensemble’s scenes are, the experiences of a scientist of color.
“Twister isn’t political” well neither is race or gender. Not every meaningful scene has to be a woman defending her intelligence as at the bear minimum equal to a man’s, not does it have to be a person of color facing off with law enforcement or belligerent racists. It can be cultural, it can be nuanced. As a white man it’s absolutely not my place to make a movie more diverse or to say what should be included, so at the end of the day it’s best to take example and inspiration from the modern films that are doing just that: being casually inclusive like we should have been all along.
This went a little off the rails so I guess,,,
tl;dr - Twister (1996) disproportionately represents men in STEM over women, and accurately shows the racial disparity in science that has been persistent in America between the 1990s and now (not to mention, ya know, every point before that). If it were to be more accurate it would need more meaningful representation of women and people of color, and I am not the person who decides how that gets done.
Twister (1996) Reboot Part 1 - a new story
Five stories of the original
When you look up Twister the synopsis you get says this:
During the approach of the most powerful storm in decades, university professor Dr. Jo Harding (Helen Hunt) and an underfunded team of students prepare the prototype for Dorothy, a ground-breaking tornado data-gathering device conceived by her estranged husband, Bill (Bill Paxton). When Harding tells Bill that Dorothy is ready for testing -- and that their privately funded rival Dr. Jonas Miller (Cary Elwes) has stolen the idea and built his own -- Bill rejoins the team for one last mission.
So the story of the original is that there are two scientists trying to launch their machine before their competitor. That’s the primary story, the ostensible arc that the movie will follow. If you knew nothing else about Twister before reading this (hello my wonderful mutuals) then you now know that, at the very least, the tension of the story will come from Jo and Bill trying to launch their device before Jonas does, and that a powerful storm is coming. From this we can break the movie down into 3 main plots and 2 subplots:
They chase tornadoes trying to launch their device
They must compete against the other device-launchers
Romance subplot
Melissa grappling with Bill’s relationship with Jo
Jo coming to terms with her true motivations
This is, believe it or not, actually a pretty complicated plot layout. But we can reduce it to three things: heart, tension from storm chasing and romance, and a clear beginning and end. That is what we need if we want the new movie to be a reboot of the old movie: these three things. The story can be radically different, in fact it should be, but it needs to have heart, it needs to have tension from tornadoes and from romance, and it needs to begin at a clear point and end at a clear point.
I could go into detail here about each of those three bullet points, but since they constitute the entirety of the reboot, I would rather go into more detail on them later.
Twister (1996) Reboot Part 2 - a new villain
Do we need a new villain?
No! We don’t! Shockingly enough, this movie predicted with wild accuracy a current theme in analytical meteorology, which is the pervasive reach of privatization. Private firms like AccuWeather currently have the capacity to provide subscription-based weather alerts for private individuals and companies that pay for the service; whereas the National Weather Service is floundering under a lack of funding. John Oliver did a really good summary of the issue here, but I 100% reading further into it.
So we can keep the villain as a meteorologist-driven-by-capitalistic-desire-rather-than-altruism and keep the story relevant and compelling. Jonas as Twister’s villain has only a thin connection to the heroes as an acquaintance from college. We can go in two directions from this: make a broader story by creating a villain closer to AccuWeather, or make a more personal story by making a villain -even an explicit antagonist- with a better defined relationship to the heroes.
More on my take on a Twister reboot villain below the cut
For my reboot, I would want a more personal story. One of the greatest disaster movies of all time, the Norwegian Bølgen, focuses only one one family and the people they tangentially interact with during the eponymous disaster wave. This setup makes for a very compelling story with memorable characters. Keeping the scope of the narrative small (reminder that Twister takes place over the course of a single day and is never more than a half an hour from Wakita) is always good if you want your movie to float like a butterfly in terms of pacing, and sting like a bee in terms of action.
For the sake of a little zest in what would otherwise be a potentially repetitive narrative, lets make the villain an active antagonist who opposes the main group. Under the guise of chasing the same storm system, this villain was sent as a saboteur to stop the heroes from collecting the necessary data. They set up roadblocks that force the heroes to take detours that may or may not be trespassing, then call the police when they trespass.
What’s their motivation? Is it pure greed-driven malice and desire to be better than their counterparts? That worked well for the original Twister, but I never felt satisfied with Jonas as a character. I felt he was important to the narrative, but his decision making was inconsistent and he didn’t deserve the end he got. Let’s make our villain something just a little more complicated. Went to the same school as one of the ensemble protagonists (not the main protagonist) but didn’t get the same financial aid. Whereas the protagonist they know could get on with their life and do what they want, the villain needed to take the highest paying job to start taking care of loans, and that brought them here.
If I wanted to make a very entertaining villain, I would make them a good person who could have been one of the heroes in another life, had college tuition not forced their hand. Show them concocting schemes to derail the protagonists in the same scene that they help people who were struck by an earlier tornado.
In the end they just get beat. They’re outmaneuvered by the heroes, or maybe in all of their scheming they failed to realize they drove directly into the path of a tornado and end up being thrown out of the movie. The only good part of Jonas in the original movie is that he didn’t take up a lot of time, whereas in this theoretical reboot more dedication would be needed to properly develop then remove a sympathetic villain-by-circumstance.
tl;dr - the real villain is America’s crippling student loan debt and privatization problems.
Twister (1996) sequel Twisters coming summer of 2024. Unfollow me now because this is all I'm gonna be talking about.
Allegedly there has been a Twisters (2024) trailer aired for the Super Bowl
I'm gonna be so normal about this I promise
Allegedly there has been a Twisters (2024) trailer aired for the Super Bowl
I'm gonna be so normal about this I promise
Cary Elwes as Dr. Jonas Miller
Twister (1996) dir. Jan de Bont
just watched Twisters, and I have some thoughts
-i feel like Kate should've walked with a limp or something, but maybe that big ol cut on her leg just missed muscles or something idk
-Tyler's crew live streams. I think they did an okay-ish job representing the sorta YouTube thing they've got going on but for the life of me I can't figure out how they'd set up their live streams.
-idea #1 they switch out the camera angles based on which one has more stuff going on. I think this might be able to feasibly work, but it would be logistically very annoying to do.
-idea #2 they simultaneously have all the cameras streaming in a grid pattern on the screen. This would probably make more sense, but I'm not sure if people would actually want to watch something like that.
-idea #3 they have multiple streams going at once of the different cameras and cut the footage up later for videos. This one, I honestly think might make the most sense but it's also kinda stupid. Idk.
-Kate's mom. I love her, she was so funny. But please why wasn't she scared when Kate went to her house in the middle of the night. She just walked into the kitchen all normal. I was waiting for her to walk in with a goddamn shotgun or something.
-and Kate being all "Mom it's me," like ok girl. Nice of you to warn her after breaking into the house ig??? you couldn't have knocked???
-Javi is a manipulative idiot. No like seriously he is. From almost the first scene in the movie you can tell he sorta likes Kate, and that's fine and all but it's what he does later that makes things so much worse.
-Javi emotionally manipulated Kate into chasing again. He knows she's traumatized, unexpectedly waltzes back into her life, and goads her into going back to Oklahoma.
-he was mad at Kate for running away from the tornado. You can't look at someone who's basically having a freaking panic attack and be like 'you shouldn't have made us miss the storm'. Like no Javi, that's not what you do.
-trying to ask her on a date after getting mad that she's having a panic attack.
he's just doing so many things and I just can't figure out why he'd even do this in the first place, like it's all just a pretty shitty move my man. It annoyed me.
but overall I did enjoy the movie. it's a solid standalone thing and I'm glad they didn't really try to completely tie it in to the first movie.
I'm going to see twister and twisters in 4DX cause my sibling is dragging me along
Shes obsessed with weather and tornadoes and stuff so obviously she tweaked when she saw a double screening of twisters and twister in 4dx
Wish me luck