Twister

IMDB
First time viewed: No
Current Release: No
Watched With: Ichina

Finally an excuse to watch my Twister bluray again. How can someone not have seen this?!?! It's the best movie ever!

Ok, so maybe it's not the best movie ever but as I've explained before, this movie was extremely influential in my life. I was Twister obsessed for a good few years. My 9th birthday was Twister themed. I know it by heart, I know every sound every line, every shot. I was denied being allowed to see Jurassic Park at the cinemas so this was the family action adventure blockbuster that introduced me to the wonders of new computer effects in films and started me off on my current career path. This movie means so much to me it does kinda hurt when everyone calls it the "worst movie ever." I can admit now that, yes, it's not Shakespeare, but I can't separate the strong sense of nostalgia and importance on my life this film had.

The effects in this film, groundbreaking at the time and most of them still hold up really well. The advent of computer graphics finally allowed for things like weather to be shaped in some way. Still it would have been a nightmare to make. There's a lot of sky replacement and some horrifyingly complicated rotoscoping in order to do that, what with corn fields, trees and hair flying everywhere. Plus all the practical effects on stage, rigging everything to fly around, including a couple of trucks, and all the rain and hail and wind.

And even through all that the sound is incredible, this was the first film I because aware of sound design, of creating these noises, each twister has a different sound. And the subwolfer gets a great work out. Jan de Bont's next film, The Haunting remake also has great sound, despite being a pretty shit film. Hell, even Speed has great sound. But it really gets to show off in Twister. The use of surround is really neat too.

Watching this film again it's crazy to think of the awesome careers this whole cast have had. This was the first time I would have seen Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jeremy Davies, Lois Smith, Zach Grenier and a whole bunch of others who I love and probably had seen before but now know primarily from their roles in this film. I also just discovered an uncredited Joss Whedon did some script doctoring on this? That could explain some of my favourite lines...

Finally I want to mention the score by Mark Mancina. It's rare you can get an action score now that's this melodic and beautiful. I think it's the perfect modern adventure score. I know every note of it and the way it fits with the film is great. You really need those big sweeping americana themes over all those awesome helicopter landscape shots of the cars driving. To me it just screams awesome.

Everything about this film just screams awesome. I'm blinded by my love for this film. Screw the haters, It's a great fun and entertaining film.