Left Hand Red

Twister (1996) seems to have a reputation as kind of a guilty pleasure. Now that we’ve seen it, it’s one of ours too.

It’s about Bill Paxton (“Game over, man!”) taking his new fiancée Jami Gertz out to the middle of nowhere, Oklahoma, to get his soon-to-be-ex-wife Helen Hunt to finally sign the divorce papers. Hunt is out in OK with her band of merry storm chasers, that Paxton left to become a TV weatherman and marry a sex therapist (not as sexy as it sounds).

The merry band all assume Paxton has come back to join him -  a fun band of scruffy hobby scientists and grad students, including Philip Seymour Hoffman in a sort of Jack Blackish role. They also run into Cary Elwes as the corporate sellout (vaguely Eurotrash?) storm chaser with the big budget and poor attitude. As you might have guessed, Hunt convinces Paxton to join in on one more storm hunt.

There are small tornadoes, big tornadoes, twin tornadoes. There are wrecked trucks, bridges, and one drive-in movie screen destroyed in the middle of The Shining (Steven Spielberg produced). Of course, Gertz gets fed up with Paxton’s storm chasing addiction, making this a “comedy of remarriage”. It’s handled fairly well: Gertz is always on the phone with a client, even in the middle of a storm, and she does get pretty hysterical after a house almost collapses on her, so clearly she’s not right for him. But she leaves on her own terms, tells Paxton they are through and says, “I know my way home.”

Although I kind of liked it as a rom-com, it was really a special-effects extravaganza. Director Jan de Bont pulled out all the stops, to the point of severely injuring Helen Hunt more than once. Not sure it was worth it, but it’s a lot of fun.

It looks like Michael Chrichton worked on the script, which may account for the total lack of scientific coherence.