Today, Twister feels like a bit of a footnote – just one of the rush of CG-heavy spectacle movies that filled movie theaters in the wake of Jurassic Park. But in 1996, Twister was a huge, huge deal. With audiences craving previously unimaginable images thanks the rise of advanced digital effects, and with more and more theaters adding full surround sound to improve the movie-going experience, Twister lit up the box office 25 years ago this month to the tune of $494 million worldwide. It outgrossed the first Mission: Impossible and briefly turned Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt into giant movie stars. Its impact on the pop-culture landscape was large enough that FOX television tried to catch some of the heat by airing a cheaply made imitation called Tornado! (starring Bruce Campbell and Ernie Hudson, natch) the very same month Twister opened.
However, a quarter of a century later, Twister doesn’t seem to find itself with much of a legacy. It never spawned a sequel, and, though it was produced by Steven Spielberg and co-written by Michael Crichton, it didn’t have the staying power of their previous collaboration, Jurassic Park. Even Independence Day, which opened a few months later and made Will Smith the biggest actor on the planet, seems to have sustained a larger cultural foothold.
Does Twister deserve better? Probably not. Watching it today, the early CG effects don’t hold up very well, and its paper-thin plotting feels like a relic of a time when spectacle alone was enough to get butts in seats. But I’d argue there is still one very good reason to watch Twister in 2021 – the cast. And I’m not talking just Paxton and Hunt (though it is still fun seeing them headline a big popcorn movie). I mean the whole cast, which is absolutely stuffed with “that guy” actors and actresses. Almost all of them have gone on to better things, and most of them have faces you will recognize even if you don’t know all of their names.
One name you absolutely will know is the great Philip Seymour Hoffman, one of Gen X’s singular talents, a man who was capable of conveying an ocean of emotions with a single look. In Twister, Hoffman plays Dusty, a dude-bro who says things like “imminent rueage” and likes to ramble on about “the suck zone.” The role is not worthy of Hoffman’s talents, but he throws himself into it so completely that many of us in 1996 just assumed director Jan de Bont walked onto the Oklahoma University campus and grabbed the most obnoxious frat boy he could find to put in his movie. I don’t know if I’d call Hoffman hilarious in Twister, but I would say it’s hilarious that it’s Hoffman playing the part. Paxton and Hoffman both died far too young, and while watching Twister isn’t nearly the best way to way to remember either of them, it is the only way to honor them both at the same time.
Joining Hoffman on Paxton and Hunt’s team of storm chasers is Todd Field as Beltzer. Yes, that Todd Field, the Oscar-nominated writer and director who made the dark and disturbing dramas In the Bedroom and Little Children, and who is finally prepping his third feature, which will star Cate Blanchett. Field started out as an actor and somehow found himself wearing a denim jacket, quoting Star Wars, and singing showtunes while chasing tornadoes that weren’t really there in Twister. You gotta love Hollywood.
Other storm chasers include Alan Ruck as Rabbit, the team’s map guy, and Jeremy Davies as Brian, the photographer. Ruck is still most known for playing Cameron in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and clearly had a supporter in de Bont, who cast him in Speed two years prior. In Twister he sports a floppy 90s haircut and is the character who reminds you this movie is 25 years old whenever he unfolds a large paper map so he can tell Paxton which way he needs to turn at the next intersection. Davies … doesn’t do much of anything, but, man, that guy ruled in Lost and Justified and he’s yet another face I love seeing here in a nothing role. He would go on to work with Spielberg again on a little film called Saving Private Ryan.
Oh, and there is also the team of “evil” storm chasers. That’s right, Twister technically has a villain who is not a giant funnel of wind. He’s a rival storm chaser named Jonas played by The Princess Bride’s Cary Elwes, who no doubt still gets stopped on the street to say “as you wish” to complete strangers. Elwes has 90s hair to rival Ruck’s, but his big contribution to this film is to suffer one of the 90s’ most hilarious and unnecessary cinema deaths. Elwes plays a character who is kind of a dick in this movie, and the audience is definitely supposed to be rooting against him. But I’m not sure he deserved to have his truck picked up by a twister and then thrown back to the ground to explode violently in a moment that I think is meant to elicit cheers from the audience. I mean, it’s not like he killed somebody. Even funnier is that Elwes’s driver, played by Zach Grenier (another “that guy” with a long list of TV and film credits, including Alex Garland’s recent limited series Devs), takes a giant piece of flying metal debris straight through the windshield to the face before the truck gets sucked up. This guy isn’t evil at all! He’s just doing his job and doesn’t even seem to particularly like Elwes. But for some reason he gets the most gruesome death in the movie. It’s an absolute riot.
If that’s still not enough familiar faces for you, I could go on. Twister also has Joey Slotnick, who has kicked around TV forever, and Jami Gertz, who some of you probably fell in love with in the 80s and now is worth a fortune because she co-owns the Atlanta Hawks basketball team with her husband. (Seriously!) Gertz tries out a very ill-advised midwestern accent here that she would probably like to forget, although it still might be better than whatever the hell Elwes is doing with his accent. Faring better is Lois Smith, a stone-cold Hollywood legend whose movie career has ranged from Five Easy Pieces to The Nice Guys. She brings a bit of gravitas to the film as Hunt’s advice-giving aunt. Scan the credits at the end of the movie and you’ll also see Anthony Rapp and Jake Busey listed. Good luck finding them in the film, though. That’s how deep Twister’s bench is – actors who went on to have solid careers barely even register here in blink-and-you’ll-miss-them roles.
Twister features a lot of interesting actors, led by improbable blockbuster leads Paxton and Hunt, yelling at each other over CB radios for two hours while they chase tornadoes. Somehow this ended up being the second biggest film of 1996. Back then, there were zero complaints about this turn of events. Today, let’s just take a moment to appreciate that this wildly random but diverse group of actors was brought together at all, let alone for a cheesy disaster movie.