NEW Paxton/hunt/elwes - Twister (Blu-ray)

The movie is of a married meteoroligist couple who are in the midst of getting a divorce, and have not gotten along for a very long time and they make a new invention that they believe will help them see what it looks like, inside a full blown tornado. They have ambition to deploy this new technology to disperse 'lighter than air' radio transmitters into a twister and record the signals to see what it may look like inside a tornado.

The special effects when the tornadoes strike are absolutely awesome not to mention the chase scenes especially towards the ending when the couple speed away from a tornado drive right through a house that was thrown onto the countryside road by a tornado (Impossible in real life) and the other of when a drive-in movie screen showing a snippet of the movie "The Shining" being ripped apart by a F5 tornado in the middle of the night.

"Twister" though suffers from several things and I can sometimes see where some of the detractors are coming from when regarding this movie. While the action scenes and special effects are amazing, the movie's plot lacks a good flow and the film drags on and on in several places and one scene which is just like a boring day at home would've been better left out altogether. Plus the characters are very unconvincing and lack personality.

Even for me who doesn't mind ocassional deviation from the laws of physics in movies, some of the tornadoe scenes are completely unrealistic. For example as I said earlier in a review, there is no way a twister could fling a whole house across a countryside road or even roll the whole intact house across the countryside because most houses are built on foundations and strong tornadoes in real life would shed houses into tiny pieces or otherwise reduce them to ruin. An F5 tornado would leave nothing of a house behind and can even rip the pavement off a road if the conditions warrant. \

This movie is nonetheless worth watching just for the tornadoes alone but this movie could have been a lot better than it turned out to be. While having it's share of flaws Roland Emmerich's "The Day After Tomorrow" is far superior on many levels and corrects a lot of the flaws of "Twister" in my opinion.

The romance between tornado-chaser Jo (Helen Hunt) and Bill (Bill Paxton), is predictable, but it is still interesting to see how it unfolds. CSI's Jamie Gertz plays the third-wheel fiancee, trailing along in hot pursuit of the storms because Jo is still sitting on the divorce papers. Her refined, Southern character is funny in contrast to Hunt's boot-stomping, full-throttle lifestyle.

Helen Hunts leads a huge pack of nerds who compromise her tornado-chasing team. It is interesting to note that Hunt is the only attractive woman in the film. It was like the casting agent deliberately surrounded her with unattractive women. Even her mother as a little girl is a big, beefy, homely farm woman, and her father is a typical redneck. How such a pretty girl could come from them, I don't know. One of my favorite characters is Jo's aunt. She is very unique.

If you like special effects, a little adventure, camaraderie, and a feeling of pursuing what you believe in, and can overlook some of the stupidity (that real life people have) of walking into a tornado, it's a great movie.