Twister (1996) – Blu-ray Disc|4K Ultra HD + Digital Code

The film portion of this review was written when Twister made its Blu-ray debut in 2008. I stand by it and don’t have much to add. It seems funny to cling to “they don’t make ’em like they used to” about a movie whose reboot-quel just came out, but there are more years between Twister and Twisters than there were between Psycho and Psycho II, and the industry has been through a sea change. High-concept blockbusters–of which Twister was one–have virtually gone the way of the dodo, replaced by “IP” blockbusters (of which Twisters is one), where all the focus is on branding. This, along with the kind of “technological progress” that’s a euphemism for the dismantling of time-honoured industry practices, has left today’s tentpoles feeling ersatz, if not curiously bespoke. The passing of Bill Paxton and Philip Seymour Hoffman in 2017 and 2014, respectively, only makes the sense of loss that much more palpable, though it hasn’t, in my experience, translated to a higher opinion of Twister, which is far from either actor’s best work. (The movie might, however, be Jami Gertz’s finest hour. Hopefully, Film Twitter’s recent reassessment of her character and performance will result in the Gertz-aissance that should’ve happened in 1996.)

**/****
BD – Image B+ Sound A Extras C+
4K UHD – Image A- Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Helen Hunt, Bill Paxton, Jami Gertz, Cary Elwes
screenplay by Michael Crichton & Anne-Marie Martin
directed by Jan De Bont

by Bill Chambers Jan De Bont’s Twister has a host of problems that mocking its physics–a common pastime among smartasses the summer of its release–doesn’t begin to address, though if the film were even one degree more earnest than it is, moments like the bit where a tornado powerful enough to hoist a tractor leaves two people clinging tenaciously to a wooden support beam under a rickety bridge unscathed would make for prime “MST3K” fodder. (That’s the thing about notorious pedant Michael Crichton, who co-wrote Twister with then-wife Anne-Marie Martin: he figures getting the technobabble right buys him more poetic license than it really does.) For starters, Helen Hunt doesn’t belong in this milieu–and by that I mean the film’s, not that of the blockbuster. (I actually thought she acquitted herself fine in What Women Want and Cast Away.) Blame the contemporary compulsion to spell everything out: The picture saddles her character, Dr. Jo Harding, with a Tragic Past™ so that she’ll have a psychological motivation for chasing twisters, something that is not only completely gratuitous but also forces us to consider her provenance in a way that would never be an issue had the film stuck to the present tense. It’s impossible to imagine the immutably bicoastal Hunt as the Midwest offspring of the rednecks who leave an indelible impression in the opening flashback, and as a result, she wanders through Twister a virtual impostor.

Retroactively, the presence of Philip Seymour Hoffman has become similarly distracting (this might be his only legitimately bad performance); I know executive-producer Steven Spielberg prides himself on a kind of prescience when it comes to casting bit parts, but it puts him at constant risk of looking like all those directors who squandered Marilyn Monroe early in her career. Hoffman plays, as SLANT’s Eric Henderson brilliantly puts it, one of Jo’s “motley band of Sherwood Forest potheads and meteorology school dropouts,” who’ve got an Acme secret weapon (nicknamed Dorothy, natch) with which they plan to revolutionize tornado research. As luck would have it, the morning of Dorothy’s launch Jo’s estranged husband Bill (Bill Paxton, seemingly a “Bill” as often as Tony Danza is a “Tony”) returns seeking a divorce, his Ralph Bellamy-dumb fiancée (Jami Gertz) in tow. What follows is a not-so-metaphorical day of weathering storms–marriage counselling by way of Mother Nature as Bill and Jo pursue the holy grail of cyclones, the F5 that killed her daddy (not literally, but yeah, literally), with the intention of feeding it electronic doodads from a tin can that will apparently yield an unprecedented amount of scientific data. Surely the only movie to ever suggest a dumbed-down His Girl Friday, Road Runner cartoon, and The Abyss simultaneously, Twister, like the latter film, features a superfluous human antagonist named Jonas (Cary Elwes), a sneering but ultimately innocuous villain in the Jay Ward mold. I’m reminded of Joe Dante’s review of Live and Let Die, in which he wrote that BigBad Kananga “hardly seems to deserve his horrible fate.” Jonas is offed in one of those annoying displays of big-studio hypocrisy–y’know, because he’s slicker and better funded than our underdog heroes.

Still, I suppose it would be a more offensive example of Hollywood’s deluded self-image if Twister weren’t, figuratively speaking, the Last Amblin Movie–the last film to serve as a repository for Spielberg’s fetishes, including but not limited to alien encounters, Ahab-ian quests, houses that collapse on themselves, drive-in theatres, absent fathers, ragtag adventurers, transfixed bystanders (at the risk of piling on Hunt, she unfortunately can’t stare at a tornado in glazed awe without it being vaguely condescending), blatant product placement, and blinding flashes of light. Once Spielberg assumed a corporate identity, so, too, did his productions cease to bear his personal stamp, and it’s instructive to compare this film to the one De Bont directed for Spielberg three years later under the DreamWorks aegis, the stiffly chic The Haunting. But though Twister‘s aesthetics may stir pangs of nostalgia today, the truth is that back then they were just lipstick on a pig. And I suppose that’s still true, except that something about having a Republican in office makes said lipstick a much brighter shade than it had become during the Clinton administration, when the cocoon of Spielbergian wonder seemed so much more unwarranted. Twister may be ersatz all the way–it finally, fatally lacks Spielberg’s fluid grace–but its once-tired idiosyncrasies have a renewed soulfulness, and as someone reared on the teat of Amblin, I have to admit I found myself strangely pacified by it this time around.

THE BLU-RAY DISC
Twister‘s Blu-ray debut comes highly anticipated by home-theatre geeks, as the LaserDisc and DTS DVD were both big demo items in their day. Although it would be an overstatement to say “brace yourself for disappointment,” the 2.40:1, 1080p transfer falls short in some ineffable way. There’s a disconcerting softness to the image that goes beyond the expectedly-diffuse anamorphic photography–skin tones, especially, have a botoxed quality in close-ups, and while this doesn’t affect fine detail per se, coarser textures appear a little too smoothed-out. This is also one of those cases where HD brings things into relief the filmmakers clearly counted on flickering projection and video’s low resolution to obfuscate, such as a few frames of the prologue that are optically frozen to lengthen the delay between strikes of lightning. That said, I have every confidence in calling this A/V presentation definitive–and yes, even downmixed by my hoary receiver, the BD’s 5.1 Dolby TrueHD audio boasts a sonic heft that transcends the innate limitations of home theatre. Twister‘s dizzyingly discrete soundmix hasn’t aged a day; as De Bont says in the supplementals, each tornado was given its own unique “voice,” and here the effort is fully rewarded for perhaps the first time since the picture’s theatrical release.

On another track, De Bont and visual effects supervisor Stefen Fangmeier fight a losing battle against the movie proper for attention thanks to the stupid decision to have their voices occupy the left and right channels, respectively, and let the film’s inherently loud soundtrack flood the surrounds. Sadly, the remaining supplements, mastered in 480i across the board and 16×9-unfriendly to boot, aren’t much compensation. Laurent Bouzereau’s typically superficial retrospective doc “Chasing the Storm: Twister Revisited” (29 mins.) finds only one cast member (Paxton) going on record and is dominated by shop-talk from the effects guys aiming to consecrate the film’s place in history as a breakthrough for CGI. Some of the B-roll–like a glimpse of the two Boeing 747 engines used to blow debris across the set–is cool, though Bouzereau is curiously infatuated with a shot of De Bont in a screening room that’s almost always excerpted without context. Narrated by Paxton in the style he reserves for James Cameron documentaries, the vintage HBO featurette “The Making of Twister” (13 mins.) is meanwhile far more promotional in nature and all but cancels out the attendant “Anatomy of a Twister” (9 mins.). Rounding out the infotainment portion of the extras is “Nature Tech: Tornadoes”–45 minutes of wind porn courtesy The History Channel. Special features finish off with two previews for Twister (the trailblazing teaser and standard theatrical trailer) plus the hopeless video for Van Halen‘s “Humans Being.” Where’s Shania? Originally published: May 13, 2008.

THE 4K UHD DISC
Warner brings Twister to the 4K UHD format just in time for the sequel. While I suspect the Dolby Atmos remix has as much to do with this being a hotly anticipated title as the video, first things first. The 2.39:1, 2160p presentation, encoded for HDR10 playback, is unambiguously superior to the Blu-ray, with one big caveat for fans and purists: Director Jan de Bont has regraded the film, so that moments where twisters are a-brewin’ take on a green patina to better reflect both the reality and de Bont’s original intentions. In a new companion featurette (see below), he says he could only accomplish this digitally, by which I assume he means using DI tools that came into being four years after the release of Twister–though he could be referring to UHD’s wider colour gamut and extended dynamic range. You can see the film attempting a visual harbinger of the tornadoes on the 2008 Blu-ray as it places a clearly bluescreened Bill Paxton and Philip Seymour Hoffman against an ominous grey-green sky, but in 4K this same sky is unsettlingly septic, and the actors themselves have undergone a colour adjustment to match their surroundings, making their compositing less conspicuous. The transfer otherwise eschews revisionism to the extent that a shot at 1:14–where the image was optically frozen to extend the length of time between lightning strikes–is as telltale as ever. And the closing crane-up to a helicopter view is still smeary.

De Bont calls this the definitive Twister–and while my memory may be faulty, I think, by and large, it restores DP Jack N. Green’s palette to what it was in theatres, taking flesh tones out of the realm of cake frosting and restoring a healthy verdancy to the endless tarps of grass. I long for a high-calibre remaster of the visually similar A Perfect World, also shot by Green. The image possibly errs on the side of oversaturation, but as certain beacons could lose their potency on the small screen, it’s good to see the yellow jeep and red pickup truck, for instance, stand out against the scenery again. HDR, too, provides a bouncing ball to follow in the set-pieces, as high-beam headlamps slice through the chaos and specular highlights catch every glimmer of available light. If there’s a criticism to be levelled at the video now, it’s that blacks are borderline crushed, contributing to the impression that the detail is looking a little thick, as we used to say. I wondered if this had anything to do with the staggered bitrate, which peaks high but tends to hover in the low-for-4K 30 Mbps range when monitored at random intervals. This may additionally result in Twister faring worse on displays larger than my 55″, though other reviewers with no doubt superior hardware have responded positively to the disc, so: shrug emoji.

De Bont, meanwhile, sings the praises of the Dolby Atmos remix on board this disc, calling it “better than the theatrical experience.” (He emphasizes that it’s “direct,” possibly another way of saying “near-field.”) This is a rare case where I longed for height channels, but the 7.1 Dolby TrueHD mixdown is stupendous, room-rattling, cat-scaring. The effort to give each twister different vocal characteristics really comes through here, and the sound is equally dazzling in calmer moments, with Aunt Meg’s steak-and-eggs breakfast enveloping us like a warm blanket in the particular symphony of greasy-spoon dining. It’s the destruction of the drive-in, however, that I would play in isolation for guests; I forgot my subwoofer can get that scarily subterranean. For what it’s worth, the soundtrack’s bitrate spikes at a whopping 16 Mbps during the aerial sweep introducing Paxton’s Bill, but I think it’s a glitch. The only regrettable thing regarding the audio is that the legacy mix wasn’t included–though in fact Twister has multiple legacy mixes, since the film began its theatrical run while they were still putting the finishing touches on the sound design! (There’s even a highly-regarded Atmos track predating this one exclusive to Turbine’s German Blu-ray from 2022.) “The Legacy of Twister: Taken by the Wind” (16 mins.) joins the previously available supplementary material, reviewed above, in rounding out the platter. Therein, de Bont discusses this revamped Twister in some detail and reflects on the experience of working with the cast, claiming he based Hoffman’s flamboyant stoner wardrobe on what Hoffman wore to his audition. He radiates nostalgia for Hoffman, Paxton, and especially the CGI cow, making his civil remarks about Hunt seem damningly diplomatic. Although Twister was de Bont’s last tolerable movie, I hope he directs again. In the U.S., a digital code is included with the disc.

• BD
  113 minutes; PG-13; 2.40:1 (1080p/VC-1); English 5.1 Dolby TrueHD, English DD 5.1, French DD 5.1; English, French, Spanish subtitles; BD-50; Region-free; Warner
• 4K
  113 minutes; PG-13; 2.39:1 (2160p/MPEG-H, HDR10); English Dolby Atmos (7.1 TrueHD core), English DD 5.1, French DD 5.1, Spanish DD 5.1; English SDH, French, Spanish subtitles; BD-66; Region-free; Warner