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1996 was a dark year for movie buffs. It was, perhaps, the weakest year for movies in my own living memory (I was born in 1966 and remember movies in the theaters back to about 1972). 1996's two biggest summer blockbusters, Independence Day and Twister, turned out to be two of the worst experiences I have ever had in a movie theater. The main difference between them is that Independence Day leaves a bad aftertaste and Twister doesn't. Twister is completely anonymous: it's flensed from the mind soon enough. This deceived me for a long time, because, in reacting so strongly to the awfulness of Independence Day, I failed to realize just how bad Twister really is. And boy howdy, does it suck.

Twister has a story, I guess. It claims it does, anyway, and lists Micheal Crichton and his wife as the perpetrators. Helen Hunt's character is tormented by the images of the tornado that struck her family's home when she was a child. To expiate this trauma, she becomes a storm-chasing meteorologist when she grows up. She and her coleagues chase tornados to study them. There is stiff rivalry between them and another group of (better funded) stormchasers. At the end of the movie, a monster of a tornado catches up to Hunt and co-star Bill Paxton and reveals some kind of bizarre lightshow at the heart of the vortex--some kind of 2001-style epiphantic catharsis.

Well, it's crap. Let's take a look at Twister's many sins, shall we?

Twister has no real characters to speak of. It has some actors stuck into the frame to give the special effects some scale, but that's about it. I would quote some of the dialogue from the movie, but since the film is instantly forgotten upon the rolling of the final credits, none comes immediately to mind...

Twister has no rain. Or, at least, not much rain. Director Jan De Bont knows that the kind of rain that precedes a tornado would obscure the special effects, so he left it out. This causes the film to look WAAAAYYYY out of sorts...

The lack of rain is compounded by the fact that tornados appear out of the sky without warning, kinda like the shark in Jaws. Kinda like, y'know, they are after someone.

Twister has no tornado sirens. As anyone who has ever visited the Midwest during the spring tornado season can attest, a tornado siren is one of the most terrifying sounds you can hear when skies are threatening.

Twister has evil meteorologists. Evil meteorologists? What?

Twister has no trailer parks. EVERYONE knows that tornados attack trailer parks first. It's a law of nature.

And finally, Twister omits the scene at the end where the flesh is flayed from Helen Hunt's and Bill Paxton's bodies by flying debris when the tornado hits them.

In its individual details, Twister is doubly awful, because at every turn, director Jan De Bont picks awkward line readings and clumsy edits. On a level of pure craftsmanship, Twister is WAY substandard. The only things worth seeing in Twister are the tornados and, hell, you can see REAL ones in those terrifying documentaries The Weather Channel sells. For that matter, the best tornado on film is still the one in The Wizard of Oz, and that one was created with some gauze and some fancy lighting: Who needs CGI effects, anyway?