Twister (1996)

I was obsessed with this movie when I first saw it at the age of eight. However when I first heard about it, I thought it was kind of scary cause it looked almost like a horror movie, but I was dead wrong. I wish to god my Dad took me to see to see this movie, so instead he took me to see the Tom Cruise movie MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE during its second week it was in theaters. This movie became one of my favorites and I know this movie by heart. Co-Created by Michael Crichton, Co-Executive Produced by Steven Spielberg, Directed by Speed director Jan de Bont and released in May 1996. The film is about a soon-to-be divorced couple (Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton), who lead a team of brash storm chasers who compete against a fellow rival team, led by an ambitious guy who’s in it for the money (Cary Elwes), to chase a series of tornados in Oklahoma by releasing a perfected data-gathering instrument into the funnel of the tornado. The performances by Hunt, Paxton, Elwes, Jami Gertz (The Lost Boys), and Lois Smith (East of Eden) were fantastic. This film featured a well known cast of actors, such as Alan Ruck (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off); Jeremy Davies (Saving Private Ryan); and Academy Award winner Philip Seymour Hoffman (Capote) to play members of Hunt and Paxton’s team. I loved the sound and visual effects in this movie that were all done by ILM (Industrial Light and Magic), led by Stefen Fangmeier, who would later go on to do such hits: SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, SMALL SOLDIERS, and THE PERFECT STORM. My favorite scene is when Hunt and Paxton are driving through a ditch while trying to get up close to the first tornado they chase and it destroys a farmhouse along the way, which was cool. The film’s soundtrack features a well known list of some of music’s great musicians: Shania Twain (No One Needs to Know), The Red Hot Chili Peppers (Melancholy Mechanics), k.d. Lang (Love Affair), and Van Halen (Humans Being). My favorite out of all of them is Respect the Wind, performed by Edward and Alex Van Halen and it appears at the end of the film. TWISTER is one of the greatest disaster movies ever made and it is one of my all-time favorites.