TWENTY YEARS SINCE TWISTER

The mid to late 90s saw a rush of disaster movies: ‘Armageddon’, ‘Deep Impact’, ‘Volcano,’ ‘Dante’s Peak’... and weather calamity ‘Twister’.

Released in 1996 (hence the title of this article), ‘Twister’ was one the better action blockbusters of the 1990s. Starring Helen Hunt, whose acting chops netted her a Best Actress Oscar, and Bill Paxton (best known for ‘Titanic’ and ‘Aliens’), the film follows an estranged couple of scientists who re-team to chase tornados for research. Sounds great, huh? Thankfully, the film has a little more plot than that, some great supporting characters (including the late, great, Phillip Seymour Hoffman) and plenty of personal peril.

You may have noticed a strange pairing in the films listed above; there’s a curious pattern in Hollywood regarding how scripts get auctioned to production companies – a draft script starts floating around the big film studios, and some might make a few interested noises. As a result, the screenplay gets tweaked, and two or more versions are purchased by different studios. Then it becomes a race to see who gets their film to the box office first. This happened with ‘Dante’s Peak’ and ‘Volcano’ - both released in 1997 - and ‘Armageddon’ and ‘Deep Impact’ - both released in 1998. The phenomenon is called twinning. More recently it appeared with the releases of ‘White House Down’ and ‘Olympus Has Fallen’ (both 2013). This happens more often with action films, and it’s pretty obvious why. It’s a tad more difficult to get away with when you have character-driven drama instead of explosions, but can easily be done with comedy or rom-coms (‘No Strings Attached’ and ‘Friends with Benefits’ both in 2011; ‘Antz’ and ‘A Bugs Life’ in 1998... I could go on).