BOX-OFFICE BLOWHARD

You know a movie is in trouble when a cow provides its only moment of authentic human interest. In Twister, as a team of meteorologists races toward a tornado, a terrified Holstein, mooing madly, blows by their windshield, then blows back again.

You can actually feel something for that poor, dumb, terrified thing. Imagine yourself quaking in her hooves: one minute you’re chewing your cud, the next you’re a UFO. But aside from one poor guy in the prologue, who disappears headfirst into a big storm’s “suck zone,” Old Bossy is the only living creature we see suffering from nature’s wrath in this film. The rest of the time the movie implies that tornadoes practice selective targeting, attacking only trucks with no visible drivers or farms where everyone has safely gained the storm cellar.

The strategy of Michael Crichton and his wife Anne-Marie Martin, who wrote the script, is obvious: turn the chaotic tragedy of natural disaster into a PG-13 thrill ride, a succession of wow special effects that the kid in all of us can get off on. Such story as the screenplay provides (an estranged couple of meteorologists, played by Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton, bicker their way toward reconciliation while chasing storms in an effort to test a new measuring instrument) is also an emotional low-pressure zone.

But in a curious way, Crichton and Martin have outsmarted themselves. To begin with, tornadoes don’t make very good movie villains. They’re big and scary, all right, but there is a certain sameness in their MOs. If you’ve seen one of them transport a large object from point A to point B, you’ve pretty much seen them all. This predictability is exactly the opposite of director Jan de Bont’s last film, Speed, in which you could never guess what would happen when Sandra Bullock wheeled her bus around a corner.

Worse, when action is never shown to have deadly or pitiable consequences, it tends toward abstraction. Pretty soon you’re not tornado watching, you’re special-effects watching. These are, to be sure, excellent, a seamless blend of digital wizardry and mechanical stunts supervised by the masterful John Frazier. Excellent too is Jack N. Green’s cinematography, stubbornly trying to supply the moods and textures missing from the script. In the end, though, Twister proves what everyone already knows–that great visual effects alone cannot carry a picture to anything but insane profitability. And that Michael Crichton has never met man, woman or scientific phenomenon that he cannot convert to dehumanized cliche.

–By Richard Schickel