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Twister
An unprecedented series of violent tornadoes is sweeping across Oklahoma. Tornado chasers, headed by Dr. Jo Harding, attempt to release a groundbreaking device that will allow them to track them and create a more advanced warning system. They are joined by Jo's soon to be ex-husband Bill, a former tornado chaser himself, and his girlfriend Melissa.
1996 · Directed by Jan de Bont · 113 min · Action · Adventure · Drama · Screenplay in the scene database · 16 frames
Tagline
The dark side of nature.
Plot
On an Oklahoma farm in 1969, young Jo Thornton and her parents take shelter from an F5 tornado that destroys their farm and kills Jo's father. Twenty-seven years later, Jo is a tornado-obsessed meteorologist leading a storm chaser team. Her estranged husband, Bill Harding, an ex-storm chaser turned TV weatherman, travels to Oklahoma with his fiancée Melissa to obtain Jo's signature on their divorce papers.
Jo shows Bill the realized "Dorothy", a device containing hundreds of small weather sensors that Bill conceptualized. Dorothy could revolutionize tornado research and potentially provide an earlier storm-warning system, but the device must be deployed dangerously close to a tornado to work. Jo's team rushes off to chase a developing storm, forcing Bill and Melissa to follow.
Jonas Miller, a rival storm chaser with corporate funding, stole Bill's idea for his own Dorothy-like device, Dot3. Bill agrees to accompany Jo and the team for one day to launch Dorothy. As the team pursues a rope tornado, Jo's truck runs into a ditch attempting to intercept it. Jo and Bill take shelter under a bridge, but the truck and one of the four Dorothy prototypes are destroyed. Bill leads the team in his own truck, chasing another tornado. They chase the tornado, now a waterspout, onto Kaw Lake that is accompanied by another with multiple vortices. The waterspout thrashes the truck around, leaving them unharmed, but Melissa is traumatized.
Plot summary from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA.
Crew
- Screenplay: Michael Crichton, Anne-Marie Martin
- Cinematography: Jack N. Green
- Edited by: Michael Kahn
- Music: Mark Mancina
- Production design: Joseph C. Nemec III
- Produced by: Kathleen Kennedy, Ian Bryce, Michael Crichton
Cast
- Helen Hunt as Jo
- Bill Paxton as Bill
- Jami Gertz as Melissa
- Cary Elwes as Jonas
- Lois Smith as Aunt Meg
- Philip Seymour Hoffman as Dusty
- Alan Ruck as Rabbit
- Sean Whalen as Sanders
- Scott Thomson as Preacher
- Todd Field as Beltzer
Production
- Country: United States of America
- Language: English
- Studios: Warner Bros. Pictures, Universal Pictures, Amblin Entertainment
- Budget: $92,000,000
- Box office: $494,471,524
- Themes: husband wife relationship, climate, tornado, twister, natural disaster, oklahoma, metereologist, invention, storm chaser, barn
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