Word: crichton
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...growing alarm, the tornado he had started out chasing was chasing him. No, this is not one of those scary scenes from the movie Twister, which opened in theaters across the country last week (see review). Rather, it is a slice of the real-life science that inspired Michael Crichton and Steven Spielberg, creators of the dinosaur blockbuster Jurassic Park, to make the movie in the first place. For Davies-Jones is not some casual thrill seeker but a serious scientist at the National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL) in Norman, Oklahoma. Over the past 2 1/2 decades...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...spurs a destructo-fest, as 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...