Twister blows onto 4K disc in a wild presentation

By Jim Bray
July 11, 2024

Just in time to cash in on this summer's sequel (or at least soften us up for its arrival), Warner Bros. has unleashed a really nice 4K version of the 1990's disaster film about storm chasers who appear to get chased as much by the storms as they do chase them.

It's a kind of classic disaster film, the type one might expect from Irwin Allen, except that this one comes from such more modern names as Steven Spielberg and Michael Crichton – folks who had already given us Jurassic Park a few years earlier.

As I said in my review of the Blu-ray when it came out: "If you open a dictionary, looking for the definition of "summer popcorn movie", chances are you'll find Twister there right next to Independence Day."

Looking back now, I might add such titles as "The Towering Inferno", "Earthquake" or "The Poseidon Adventure", classic disaster movies that probably kept Orville Redenbacher in business.

As with the others, Twister is another special effects extravaganza, one that eschews such trivialities as a logical screenplay and believable characterizations – despite coming partly from the word processor of the great Michael Crichton – instead embracing eye candy and a fantastic surround sound soundtrack.

It's enough, though when there's no weather on screen the film is kind of silly. Okay, really silly. And kind of dumb.

When Parent Nature does rear his/her/its ugly head, though, wow!

Twister, directed by Jan de Bont of "Speed" fame, stars Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton as storm chasers and former main squeezes who, rather handily, are thrown back together just as twister season is heating up. To Hunt, whose father was swept away by a tornado in the movie's narrative hook opening, the tornadoes are as much her Moby Dick as "climate action".

Paxton, on the other hand, is a former storm chaser who now has a gig as a TV weatherman, undoubtedly to up his scientific credentials. He and his fiancé, Jami Gertz, show up at Hunt's operation to pick up the divorce papers Hunt's supposed to sign and he's lucky enough to have chosen just when all hell breaks loose in Oklahoma's tornado alley.

Cue the next special effects scene – and it's about time!

Hunt's character's plan is to release a bunch of little sensors right into a tornado so it can take them up into itself and, from there, they hope they can learn how to predict where a tornado will go. I guess they want to hardwire into the brain of the twister, if there is such a thing. And there just may be, because over the course of the movie it almost seems as if the tornadoes are living, breathing monsters kind of reminiscent of the shark in Spielberg's Jaws (I'm sure the Spielberg connection is completely coincidental).

It's an interesting concept, but I guess not interesting enough because the filmmakers had to insert a bad guy, Dr. Jonas Miller (Cary Elwes), who seems to be a bad guy because he accepted the corporate sponsorship that helped give his team nicer trucks and stuff than what the good guys have to live with. He and his happy little band of storm chasers are mostly wasted and the movie would have been just fine as a "man against nature" story instead of "man against nature – and, oh yeah, another man".

Maybe the movie would have been too short then. But, hey, I'm not cynical.

Story aside, this is a great roller coaster ride in the home theatre. It's a popcorn movie at heart and I was there for the special effects – and they're worth the price of admission.

The CG is terrific, thanks to the good folks at George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic special effects facility, which from Star Wars onward rewrote the special effects book and were pretty much the leading effects house until Peter Jackson raised the bar again with Weta Digital (now Wētā FX) and his Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Here, the tornados are rendered with exquisite detail, including thousands of bits of debris (some of which are truck or house-sized, some of which are cow-sized, and some of which are just bits picked up from the twister's path. It's very well done and is a good example of how CG was evolving at the time.

The Blu-ray I reviewed years ago was clean and sharp, but kind of flat, not really exhibiting that "pop off the screen depth" that can make HD (and UHD) so wonderful to see. They've fixed that for this UHD 4K release, with high dynamic range. It looks really great now! Apparently, that's due at least in part to the director's involvement in the process. Needless to say, detail is fantastic, colours are exemplary, and the picture really does display great blacks and good depth.

That's great, but wait until you hear the sound! The track is now in Dolby Atmos, of course, which defaults down to Dolby TrueHD (which is how I auditioned it). When Parent Nature is asleep, the movie seems more front-channel-focused, which is fine, but once he/she/it decides it's time to mess with the humans and their stuff again, your whole room will erupt with glorious noise that puts you right into the action. I loved it!

I've often complained about Warner titles that have so much bass it makes the pictures on my walls shake. This one has all of that dynamic output, but without the added angst of errant and unwanted sounds from the room. It's really good!

You even get a decent set of extras, including a new interview with director de Bont. It's called "The Legacy of Twister: Taken by the Wind" and he remarks that after the 4K restoration he thinks this disc version might even be better than the movie looked on film. That's high praise and, though I never saw Twister in the theatre, I will say this new version looks fantastic. Then he moves on to talk about the special effects, the production in general, shooting on location in Tornada Alley in tornado season, etc.

There's also a commentary track featuring Jan de Bont and VFX supervisor Stefen Fangmeier, though it, like some of the other extras, isn't new. Chasing the Storm: Twister Revisited, is a nearly half hour retrospective, there's also an old HBO First Look: The Making of Twister, a short Anatomy of a Twister and even a repeat of the old Van Halen "Humans Being" Music Video.

And, as I noted in my old Blu-ray review, nowhere in all of this fun do they even mention the game of Twister! How can that be?