Twister (Laserdisc Movie Review)

I never had the chance to watch Twister on theatres, so I didn't hesitate on buying one of its laserdisc (LD) editions, now that the LD format is - unfortunately - dying, at least here in Europe.

Now that I've enjoyed the 4 CAV sides (constant angular velocity) of my dual LD edition, I - for once - must agree with the mainstream critics that wrote that... basically... Twister is quite dumb. It really is.

Twister is 113 minutes of pure spectacle: nervous acting, stressing screaming, very professional special effects, and tons of surround sound. Actors and actresses do their best, but they simply can't do more with a really repetitive script, consisting of nothing more than "dialogues", that go like this "it's here!", "let's go!", "come on!", "I see it!"...

The "exciting dialogues" happen as two teams of "tornado hunters", run across the USA, trying to debut technology that will go to a "tornado's core" and gather all the data that will make it possible to build a mathematical model of it. This model would help to preview such devastating events, minutes earlier than it is now possible.

The aforementioned two teams are competing to be the first delivering the math model, and are roughly divided in "bad guys" (BG) and "good guys" (GG). The BG have corporate money and are accused of stealing ideas; the GG have less money, plenty of craziness and someone who "can feel" the phenomena... The movie follows the GG, showing how unimaginative the BB are, as they do no more than following the rivals...

My Twister LD edition is fun, half of the time... then it gets ruined, because the remaining half keeps telling the same cat && mice story, but with no novelties, as all the SFXs have been seen before, and the all the personages' feelings have already been exposed. Nothing remains... just some hard 60 minutes of boring screams, noisy collisions, and highly ridiculous situations, such as a couple of "scientists" running after cheap silver christmas balls, that are supposed to be the "high tech sensors" that will collect information inside the Tornado.

My LD edition has a THX stamp, perfect 2.35:1 relation, analogue and digital Dolby Surround as good as it gets, plus 36 chapters offering extras like some theatrical trailers... but the movie itself simply doesn't help making this a worthy package.

Superb LD edition; very average movie... It's your decision.

One last note, and its on the DVD versus LD combat: the LD edition is clearly *better* on image quality and everyone can notice it on big screens. It's a shame the LDs are dying.