Not many blockbusters can lay claim to earning almost half a billion dollars at the box office, securing a pair of Academy Award nominations, win a BAFTA, and claim a Razzie “victory” all at once, but that’s just the majesty of Twister in a nutshell.
The second highest-grossing release of 1996 behind only Independence Day, director Jan de Bont’s demented disaster epic endures as a glorious slice of prime cheese that’s as watchable now as it ever was, with the effects still holding up surprisingly well among a stacked cast of talent that make even the smallest parts memorable.
In a retrospective interview with Inverse, the filmmaker stated his belief that Twister was lightning in a bottle, although there does seem to be one major glaring issue with his confidence.
“When things fell from the sky, there were real things falling from a helicopter. If you film a car escaping a tornado in a hail storm, it was real ice that came at us. It’s a movie that cannot be remade… That would never, ever happen again.”
The elephant in the room is of course Minari director Lee Isaac Chung’s legacy sequel Twisters set for release next year, with de Bont admitting “I want to have somebody else see it first,” which is fair enough. Will it be as good the original? Potentially given the pedigree of the man behind the camera, but you’d suspect it won’t go anywhere near as heavily on the in-camera carnage in the age of CGI overload.