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Twister

Twister

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: THE BEST MOVIE
Review: THIS IS THE BEST MOVIE IT'S FUNNY AND ROMANTIC AT THE SAME TIME. HELEN HUNT AND BILL PAXTON ARE JUST GREAT TOGETHER IN THIS MOVIE. IT'S ONE OF MY FAVORITES....

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Helen Hunt in her most annoying role to date.
Review: Is it just me or is Helen Hunt an annoying actress? As for the film, there is great action and solid special effects. It's just that Helen Hunt is so obnoxious in her role in this film.

Bill Paxton does a solid job but one can't help but realize the nose dive his career took after this film was done. Oh well. Twister might have you wanting to become a storm chaser when it's all said and done. I know I gave it some thought.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Learning the true meaning of "being blown away"!
Review: When "Twister" was released in 1996, it was panned by many film critics; but not everyone agrees. "Twister" takes place in America's heartland where tornadoes are common and where residents live in fear of destruction any time a very dark cloud looms overhead.

The film depicts the desires of the scientist, Dr. JoAnne Thornton-Harding (Helen Hunt), to get a tornado to swallow up hundreds of sensors so that scientists can analyze their data and obtain a better understanding of tornado dynamics. Her soon-to-be-divorced husband, William 'Bill' Harding (Bill Paxton), plans to marry a very urban psychologist, Dr. Melissa Reeves (Jami Gertz), as soon as JoAnne signs the divorce papers. Bill brings the divorce papers out to JoAnne, but she's too busy with her sensors and the discovery of a nearby funnel cloud. JoAnne and her crew hurry off to chase the funnel cloud with Bill & Melissa along for the ride.

Over the course of the film, Melissa disovers what Bill really likes to do and that he still has a lot of feelings for JoAnne. She also realizes that she hates being in very close proximity to tornadoes.

The special effects and constant action in the film keep the audience at the edge of their seats!

If you want to "get blown away", this is a great film to own!

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: I used to Like it.
Review: I used to like this movie when it came out in 1996. I thought the special effects were good and the storyline was good. As just in Independence Day, I found myself saying "Why Did I ever like this movie?" When I watched it again I found that most of the twisters looked fake and the story was really bad. Although it was still fine watching it sometimes, I get annoyed by the characters and how they acted to his fiancee. This was a movie of the times and does not age well as time passes.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Excellent Movie.
Review: The house rips apart piece by piece. Tractors fall down like bombs. Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton star in this movie as tornado chasers. They need to launch electric sensors into the funnel. But to do so, they need to get in the twister's deadly path. The chase is on in this exciting new adventure movie called "Twister". Ya hoo! See it. You'll love it! This not a waste of time. See it NOW!

Rating: PG-13 for Intense Depiction Of Very Bad Weather, Violence, and Some Language.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: These twisters ...
Review: I had probably forgotten the story line of this movie before reaching the parking lot of the theater where I watched it. What I can still recall are the Hollywood-ized, utterly fake encounters with the "tornadoes". Absolutely everything about the storms themselves and the science of storm chasing was grossly inaccurate. From the Kenmore ice cube tray hailstorm to the "green sky" nowhere near an active thunderstorm, to the individual plucking of fence posts (how does wind impinge such an upward force on a paralell-aligned object fixed to the ground?) to the moment-by-moment predictions that the tornado is going to turn left or right, to the chasers riding alongside a tornado in an effort to have intercourse with it, etc., etc., etc., etc., etc. Nothing was even close to reality.

Tornadoes are a fascinating subject. There are plenty of videos featuring REAL storm chases. Start (and end) your search with those types of videos.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: "We have touchdown. Touchdown. Tornado is on the ground"
Review: Twister has a worthy premise, some thrilling action sequences, and a great deal of potential, yet disappointingly is a film that adds up to less than the sum of its parts. Tornadoes cut swathes of devastation through mid-USA every year and television audiences the world over are shocked and yet strangely titillated by the resulting newsreel footage. So as a film following a group of (fictional) storm chasers as they attempt to scientifically measure a tornado from the inside (with a view to improving the warning systems), Twister has all the ingredients of an extraordinary viewing experience. It is certainly fast-paced and exciting, but also regrettably formulaic.

Cliches abound - cute dogs saved from imminent peril; chaser crews composed of stereotypical weirdo science nerds; a daring rescue from a destroyed house seconds before it collapses; some unexorcised trauma about a father's death-by-tornado; Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt cheating death innumerable times, even as the bad guys (rival tornado chasers) succumb. . . . . . . . . .

The special effects are what save this film from mediocrity. The tornadoes are frighteningly real and the debris showers (including a cow and a petrol tanker) will have audiences ducking for cover. And unlike many disaster films that seem to drag as they build to a climax, the tornadoes in Twister appear right from the word go. Bizarrely the soundtrack to the tornadoes was made by dubbing a camel's groan and slowing it down - resulting in some rather odd sounding twisters. By the time the camel is finally silenced and the story reaches its predictable conclusion, the cliches and improbabilities threaten to overwhelm, and the film ultimately fails to completely satisfy.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: An excellent popcorn movie...
Review: This is one of my all time favorite movies. The characters are fun, the movie puts you on the edge of your seat at times, and there's some humor thrown in as well.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Plot? What Plot?
Review: "Twister" is a movie that serves the appetizers but not the main course. Throughout the movie, we're treated to some really cool special effects that capture the horror of a tornado. Winds blow, cars get turned upside down, and even cows get tossed about. Hands down, the twister itself should have gotten an award for Best Actor in a Leading Role. The rest of the movie, however, is completely negligible. Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton do little more than run around, looking scared and uttering lines of dialogue that never graduatre from the obvious. And the plot? It's basically an afterthought. Twister makes a decent if unspectacular DVD, though. Not only does the 5.1 mix rock the house, but thanks to the chapter selections, you can skip those boring parts that have tons of dialogue and go straight to the action scenes. "Twister" isn't a bad movie, but a very bland one minus the special effects. Recomended for die-hard action fans only; casual movie watchers should proceed with caution.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Maybe not unflawed, but better than average
Review: Even if the melodramatics and the dialogue are contrived, TWISTER is still one of the best of the latter-day disaster films. Much more realistic than a volcano turning L.A. into lava (VOLCANO) or a gung-ho uprising against evil aliens (INDEPENDECE DAY), the subject at the center of this 1996 sci-fi/disaster movie is one of the deadliest manifestations of nature--the tornado.

Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton portray scientists who, though they are on the edge of divorcing, are soonthrown back together when extremely violent storms form on the eastern fringe of the Rockies and soon sweep into the Midwest, an area known as "Tornado Alley." Paxton looks upon it as a science, but Hunt is much more obsessive about it; she has been ever since a twister in June 1969 killed her father. Caught up in this whole tornado business is Paxton's intended next wife (Jami Gertz).

Competing with a former partner (Cary Elwes) of theirs whom Paxton refers to as a "night crawler", Hunt and Paxton continually try to get their new tornado mapping device they call "Dorothy" (inspired by THE WIZARD OF OZ) into the heart of one of these dark and deadly storms. They finally manage to do it with a monster twister measuring a mile wide at the base, but they nearly become casualties of that monster.

Despite the contrivances, TWISTER works because of the fine performances of Hunt and Paxton, who work good together even when they're bickering. The film itself has a very kinetic, suspenseful, and downright frightening quality to it, thanks in large part to the direction of Jan DeBont (SPEED) and the realistic premise of the screenplay by Michael Crichton (JURASSIC PARK; WESTWORLD) and his wife Anne-Marie Martin. The tornado effects, including the flying cow, the runaway debris, and the fuel tanker, are all quite hair-raising.

This is about as realistic a disaster film as there has been since the grand-daddy of all disaster films, Irwin Allen's 1974 epic THE TOWERING INFERNO. It may not be an unflawed film, but it's definitely better than average.


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