Word: bonte
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Devlin and Emmerich approached the project gingerly, having rejected four previous overtures from Sony to take charge of Godzilla. The monster appeared to be unmanageable. Jan De Bont (Speed) tried to tame the beast for a while but gave up after Sony balked at the budget he wanted for a script that had Godzilla battling a shape-shifting beast. James Cameron (Titanic), Tim Burton (Batman) and David Fincher (Alien 3) were among the directors at one time considered to update Godzilla. When Steven Spielberg, who knows from dinosaurs, heard that Devlin and Emmerich were contemplating the movie, he tried...
This is not entirely his fault. The screenwriters, Randall McCormick and Jeff Nathanson, and the director, Jan de Bont, have no interest in providing their actors with stuff to act. Their job is to keep the whammos coming. Our job is to sit there, absorb the blows and pretend to like their cold expertise. With De Bont's quick wit and tense minimalism on the first Speed still fresh in mind, that's hard work...
...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...
...naughty tornados send cars crashing and rip the roofs off barns. One suspects that, as a movie monster, this killer twister may be a dud: it has no personality and can't sneak up on you. But with the heft of Steven Spielberg, Michael Crichton and Jan de Bont (Speed) behind it, Twister could suck hot air and still gross a quick $100 million...
...course, De Bont makes up for the restraint in one area with an excess in another. This is a damm destructive movie. Things crash, blow up and burn at tan amazing rate--planes, (subway) trains, automobiles...