Twister in a Nutshell

Twister is about a TV weatherman Bill Harding is trying to get his tornado-hunter wife, Jo, to sign divorce papers so he can marry his girlfriend Melissa. But Mother Nature, in the form of a series of intense storms sweeping across Oklahoma, has other plans. Soon the three have joined the team of stormchasers as they attempt to insert a revolutionary measuring device into the very heart of several extremely violent tornados.

The Twister Movie Trailer

The Twister Movie Breakdown

Who is in it? Bill Paxton, Helen Hunt, Cary Elwes, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Alan Ruck, and Jami Gertz.
Genre: Action, Adventure, Drama
Was it action packed? Yes.
Would this movie be for every Action/Adventure fan? Yes, unless you hate natural disaster movies.
Should you see it? Yeah. Id check it out at least once.
Run Time: 113 minutes.
Rating: PG-13

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The Verdict

This movie is the kind of flick that you know is ridiculous, but will always flash in your mind when you hear the tornado sirens go off. There are tons of inaccuracies in there but at the end of the day it was a fairly decent movie. The ironic part about the movie to me, was the over all goal inside the plot itself. The goal inside the plot was to increase tornado warning times from 3 minutes to 15 minutes by putting a special device full of weather sensors in the path of a tornado. The sensors in theory will be sucked inside the tornado and it will give us an idea of whats going on inside there. Im no scientist or anything, but the only crap inside there is spinning air and debris. How can knowing that change anything… but I digress from my first point.

The weather service they get their reports from tell them about tornado touchdowns way longer than 15 minutes in advance. Why not just have that agency report directly to the public without spending a ton of grant money on a tin can with detachable sensors inside? Because nobody will pay to see THAT movie is why. So lets put the movie into a large nutshell then condense it a little more for the official Nutshell-Movies explanation finale. Two married storm chasers meet up to get their divorce finalized. The woman shows the man the realized invention he had thought of years previous. The invention is a weather machine named ‘The Dorothy’.

In a severe lightning storm, you wanna grab your ankles and stick your butt in the air.

The Dorothy (Device): A weather machine that when placed inside a tornado will release hundreds of sensors giving us metrics inside a twister.

They reconcile their relationship after chasing rapid fire tornadoes and failing to get their invention to work. After the destruction of the woman’s aunt’s house and seeing her ridiculous lawn art she gets the idea to put tiny wings on the sensors to make them fly into the funnel using the wind it gives off. They drive their red (previously tornado proof) Dodge Ram into an F5 tornado and the sensors fly inside and measure wind velocity and crap. The End.

There is a LOT of crap wrong with this movie aside from the entire plot itself, like the Dodge Ram truck not being effected by the high velocity winds even as a flying semi truck beside them is… or like that same Dodge being inside two tornadoes simultaneously and it just does donuts on the pavement. Yeah there is a ton of crap wrong with this movie, BUT over all it was enjoyable to watch.

Official Nutshell-Movies Explanation

Twister (1996): Storm chasers build a device that will track metrics inside a tornado and expand the early warning system from 3 mins to 15.

Fun Facts

• A jet engine from a Boeing 707 was used to generate wind in some scenes.
• A recording of a camel’s moan was slowed down and used as the sound of the tornado.
• In order to get the background skies looking suitably stormy, the truck cab sequences had to be flooded with high-intensity lighting for contrast. As a result, Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton suffered minor retinal burns through much of the filming.
• “It sucks” was originally going to be used as one of the taglines for the film, but the producers felt that it worked too much to the advantage of disappointed audiences and critics.
• The real town of Wakita, Oklahoma had part of its old downtown area demolished by the film crew for the scenes after the twister passes. The studio then paid for the downtown to be rebuilt. The town also kept the new fire truck used in the film.
• Was the first movie released on DVD, and the last to be released on HD-DVD.
• The instrument package used in the movie, “Dorothy”, is actually a homage to the instrument pack real tornado researchers attempt to place in the paths of tornados, “T.O.T.O.”.
• The project was a co-production between Universal and Warner Bros. That is why the drive-in marquee shows Psycho (1960) a Universal release and The Shining (1980), a Warner Bros. release.
• According to the book on the making of the movie, the CGI cow picked up by the twister sisters was originally a CGI zebra from Jumanji (1995).
• An urban legend states that a tornado hit a drive-in theater in the town of Stoney Creek, Ontario while this movie was playing. What really happened was that on May 21, 1996 a tornado hit a drive-in theater that was scheduled to play this movie. The movie was not actually playing when the tornado hit.
• At the end of the movie Bill remarks that the tornado didn’t take the house. In fact, it was originally supposed to. The Hardin County, Iowa, Historical Society and many citizens objected to the house being blown up so it was spared. The area is now a tourist attraction as the rubble from the barn and fences is still there exactly as it was in the movie.

If you live in the mid west, you’ll think of Twister during tornado season.