Bill Harding (Bill Paxton) is a man about to embark on a new career as a weatherman and on the verge of marrying his girlfriend, Dr. Melissa Reeves (Jami Gertz) - all he needs are the divorce papers from his ex-wife, Dr. Jo Harding (Helen Hunt). You see, Bill and Jo used to work together alongside a team of scientists chasing tornadoes, hoping to learn more about them so that they can develop an early warning system that just might save lives down the road, but Bill gave that up when he and Jo split up. When Bill and Melissa approach Jo, who is in the midst of some work when they arrive, Bill's excited to find that Jo has finished work on 'Dorothy' - a container full of balls that can be swept up inside a tornado and hopefully allow them to track it and learn more about it. As a tornado approaches, Bill reconnects to his past life as a tornado chaser, much to Melissa's dismay, and everyone gets in their trucks to try and launch 'Dorothy' into the heart of a tornado to conduct their research.

Unfortunately for Bill and Jo and their team, a group of competing scientists, lead by Dr. Jonas Miller (Cary Elwes), have stolen their idea and built a 'Dorothy' of their own. They plan to beat Bill and Jo to the punch and steal all the glory for themselves. Both groups head into the middle of the storm but neither realizes just how big this twister is going to get or how their lives will be forever altered by its path.

Directed by Jan De Bont (of Speed and Lara Croft, Tomb Raider: The Cradle Of Life) and co-written by Michael Crichton (Jurassic Park) and Anne-Marie Martin, Twister is really just a series of fantastic effects set pieces strung together by a couple of corny subplots - one romantic and one competitive. The filmmakers know that tornadoes are scary and for good reason, they're wildly unpredictable and prone to fits of mass destruction, and it's this point that the movie relies on, not the plot itself. To the credit of Paxton, Hunt and to a lesser extent Elwes and Gertz, the film is reasonably well acted. Bill and Jo make for a likeable couple and you want them to wind up together in the end if they're able to make it out of the heart of the storm alive, but really, there are a few moments in the film that are literally groan inducing in their completely predictable sweetness.

So with the plot being more or less disposable and the bulk of the heavy lifting done by the effects team, does Twister hold up? In many ways it does. The scenes where the teammates are running to or from the tornadoes are exciting and very well done. The film does a great job of showing us the scale of such a storm and the way in which it can move quickly in one direction and then the next and the effects techs are given plenty of opportunity to flex their creative muscle during the film's running time. A few of the CGI effects look a little dated but not so much as to ruin the film and if spectacle if your thing, you'll find Twister a pretty enjoyable, if fairly brainless, thrill ride. None of the characters have any real depth or personality but the tornadoes are neat and fun to watch and if you don't want to think too much, Twister is a good time at the movies.

Video:

Twister looks pretty impressive in this 1080p VC-1 encoded 2.40.1 widescreen presentation. Granted, it doesn't quite have the luster of something made within the last couple of years (hard to believe the film is over a decade old already) but there's a lot of detail brought out here that wasn't evident in the standard definition transfers we've seen in the past. Colors have a lot more depth and natural warmth to them than they have in the past and the blacks are definitely stronger without ever getting too murky. Skin tones look very lifelike and natural most of the time (though they do fluctuate in a couple of scenes) and there aren't any problems at all with mpeg compression artifacts or heavy edge enhancement. Obviously the scenes where the tornados are flying around tend to look overly gritty but that's the way it's supposed to look, it's not a fault of the transfer which is otherwise very clean and detailed. The image doesn't fly off the screen at you like some of the best Blu-ray transfers do but it does look very good and leaves little to complain about.