Twister (1996) on Netflix
PG-1319961h 53mActionAdventureDrama
Meteorologist Jo Harding leads a storm-chasing crew across Oklahoma. Her estranged husband Bill arrives with his fiancée Melissa for a divorce signature and then joins the hunt for a tornado.
- Netflix3.5/5
- IMDb6.6/10253,860 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes66%
Trailer
Plot summary
Jo Harding is a girl on an Oklahoma farm when a tornado tears the farm apart and kills her father. Twenty-seven years later she is a meteorologist leading a storm-chasing team. Her estranged husband Bill Harding, once a chaser and now a television weatherman, drives to Oklahoma with his fiancée Melissa Reeves to collect the signature that will end their marriage. Jo shows him Dorothy, the device he first imagined, which holds hundreds of small weather sensors and only works when it is released close to a tornado. When her team rushes off after a developing storm, Bill and Melissa follow, and Bill agrees to ride along for a day to launch Dorothy. Jonas Miller, a rival chaser, has a similar device with corporate backing.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Twister (1996)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Director Jan de Bont knocked over a camera assistant into a ditch in a fit of rage and refused to apologize, prompting cinematographer Don Burgess and his whole crew to walk off the set, which brought producer Steven Spielberg to Oklahoma to personally admonish de Bont.
- Two days before filming wrapped, replacement cinematographer Jack N. Green was hospitalized after a hydraulic house set built to collapse on cue was mistakenly triggered while he was still inside it, hitting him in the head and injuring his back.
- On May 10, 2010, the film's 14th US release anniversary, a real tornado struck Fairfax, Oklahoma and destroyed the actual farmhouse used for many of the film's scenes; owner J. Berry Harrison, a former state senator who had lived there since 1978, said the twister looked eerily like the movie's.
- After star Bill Paxton died in 2017, hundreds of storm chasers and Spotter Network users spelled out his initials across Texas, Kansas and Oklahoma using their location markers, crediting the film with inspiring many of them to take up storm chasing and meteorology.
- Halfway through filming, Paxton and Hunt were temporarily blinded by the bright electronic lamps used to make the sky behind them look dark and stormy. Paxton remembers that "these things literally sunburned our eyeballs. I got back to my room, I couldn't see"; a Plexiglas filter fixed it.
- Ford tried to get its new 1997 F-150 into the film as the lead vehicle but lost out to Chrysler's Dodge Ram 2500; the five Rams supplied for filming went through 20 windshields from flying debris during the shoot.
- Two other writers sued the studio claiming the film's storm-chaser premise was stolen from their own scripts: Daniel Perkins's Tornado Chasers, which settled for an undisclosed sum, and Stephen B. Kessler's Catch the Wind, whose case was dismissed.
- The real town of Wakita had a section of its older part demolished to shoot the aftermath of the film's F4 tornado; the location was chosen after scouts found leftover debris from a major hailstorm there in June 1993, and most residents signed up as extras at $100 per day.
