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.