Director Jan de Bont’s 1997 action thriller debuts in the 4K format and offers both a sober reminder of the dangers of extreme weather as well as a nostalgic journey for home entertainment devotees. The story focuses on the crazed occupation of storm chasers in Oklahoma and, in particular, a bickering couple of nearly divorced researchers — Jo (Helen Hunt) and Bill Harding (Bill Paxton) — as they rekindle their love amid a string of treacherous tornadoes. The plot thickens as a corporate-sponsored team of chasers battles their ragtag team in a race to deploy a high-tech device that gets sucked into a tornado and measures parts of it to understand the structure and help hone warning systems in the future.
The pair eventually find themselves literally in the middle of an F-5 tornado (the strongest type recorded), nicknamed the “finger of god” and trying to survive the storm and each other. The ensemble cast also includes Philip Seymour Hoffman as Dusty Davis and Alan Ruck as Robert “Rabbit” Nurick, part of the Hardings’ team, and Cary Elwes as Jonas Miller, the leader of the rival chasers. Not only is the movie a thrill ride at many moments (Universal Studios theme parks even had a dark simulation based on the film years ago), but viewers will also learn something about the science swirling around nature’s force such as using the Fujita scale to measure a tornadoes intensity.
Better yet, the nostalgia for technophiles is “Twister” was the first movie avail.
