Twister - 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray SteelBook

Three years ago I reviewed Turbine’s remastered Blu-ray Mediabook and my thoughts about this film haven’t changed in in that time. They haven’t changed because I’ve never wavered from my enthusiasm for this film in the 28 years since I saw it opening night in the theater. I come from a family of tornado obsessives who would gladly stand on the porch to see one instead of taking shelter (we did that many times growing up). If anything I’m more of a fan of this film today than I was then because I’ve successfully introduced my four-year-old boy to Twister and it’s his new favorite film. I kid you not, we’ve watched it no less than 30 times in the last two months. So now that it’s here in 4K, what’s one or a dozen more viewings, right? 

Here’s my 2021 Twister Remastered Blu-ray Mediabook review:

Tornadoes are a deadly unpredictable force of nature capable of devastating entire cities in mere moments without warning. During one of the largest storm systems to ever hit Oklahoma, storm chasers Bill Harding (Bill Paxton) and his estranged wife Jo (Helen Hunt) and their team have a chance to test a new tornado tracking device and give people better warning. With a rival storm-chasing team on the hunt, each twister is getting bigger, more destructive, and deadly. 

Similar to how I have a need to watch The Shining every year in the icy depths of winter, I have to watch Twister every summer. As a kid, my family had an obsession with watching big storms hoping for a glimpse of a funnel cloud passing over our rural Michigan home. My sister and I would stare in awe at those creepy green skies with our dad while our mom hid in the basement. 1996’s Twister was the closest we ever got to see the real thing. Our local multiplex had just upgraded to digital sound and it was a crushing cacophony of action and adrenaline and we were loving it… then the film broke just as the last tornado was chasing our heroic meteorologists. 

Admittedly the film is all over the place as it tries to sammich in a pretty tepid relationship melodrama between Paxton and Hunt against the backdrop of a lot of scientific mumbo-jumbo meteorological jargon. Penned by Michael Crichton and his wife Anne-Marie Martin, the original script was extremely jargon-heavy and basically unfilmable. It took a number of uncredited script doctors to make this film not sound like we were watching the local news weatherman for two hours. 

You get a line read like: “The N.S.S.L. says the cap is breaking. Tower’s going up 30 miles up the dry line.” That doesn’t make a lick of sense to Average Joe’s and doesn’t amount to anything dramatic, but it sounds all sciencey and cool so it gets a pass. On the other hand Paxton’s speech: “Things go wrong. You can’t explain it! You can’t predict it! Killing yourself won’t bring your dad back.” Now that is a thick slice of delicious melodrama cheese! Toss in an evil scientist villain with Cary Elwes and you have yourself a fully-packed disaster movie!

I’ll never be the first person to call this a truly great movie. But for a special effects show with amazing sound design, Twister is a winner! Yeah, you can spot all of the bright sky backgrounds that don’t line up with the dark and stormy CGI twister in front of them. Sure the brief love triangle storyline is hammy, but it gets you invested in the characters for at least a little bit. You also need to appreciate the number of practical effects that went into this film from blowing up a tanker full of gas to building and demolishing an entire town to recreate the storm damage. 

Jan de Bont took all of the tricks he learned for Speed and hit the accelerator for Twister. This movie is a genuine popcorn flick classic. It may not hold up for the youngsters out there, but for oldtimers like myself, it’s a nostalgic favorite. Prior to his passing ,Paxton tried to get a sequel off the ground and recently Helen Hunt even pitched an idea but alas no one bit. We can get half a dozen stupid Sharknado movies - but there’s only one true Twister. (obviously, times have changed since this review was published with Twisters aiming to destroy local theaters on July 19th, 2024).

Vital Disc Stats: The 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray  

Jan de Bont’s weather disaster epic Twister drops on 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray with a single-disc 4k UHD + Digital SteelBook from Warner Bros. No remastered Blu-ray is included, which is a shame since that old WB Blu-ray was a real turd of a disc in its day. Pressed on a Region Free BD-66, the disc is housed in a standard black 4K case with identical slipcover artwork. The disc loads to a static image main menu with standard navigation options. The SteelBook isn’t exactly the most creative piece of original artwork. It’s essentially just vague black silhouettes of characters, vehicles, a single tornado, and two cows against a green/grey background. It’s fine, it’s just not exciting compared to the standard slipcover release let alone the iconic original poster art. If you miss out on this particular SteelBook, I wouldn't call that a big loss. 

Aside from a couple of little color timing tweaks, I gotta say the wait for Twister in 4K was worth it. In the last 20 years, Twister had a troublesome life on disc ever since WB dumped their Blu-ray and HD-DVD discs on us. That release, as many of you may remember, looked over-bright, flat, lacked anything resembling natural film grain, and everyone just looked like Botoxed-up glossy-faced versions of their former selves. In short - it was ugly. With Jan de Bont supervising the transfer, we have a fresh, new, and very satisfying look at the film - that actually looks like a film! Fine film grain is apparent throughout, but nowhere near noisy or intrusive. That one static shot with lightning flashes at the beginning still looks janky as ever but that’s just charm at this point. Facial features, Hoffman’s wild attire, and little fine details in the team’s vehicles are all on display with terrific clarity. Faces actually look like real human faces, not pod people who got interrupted halfway into their cloning process. I was also very impressed with how well the old CGI tornado effects held up and blended with the improved resolution. Some fake rain effects still stick out, but they always have. 

Now the film has undergone a little bit of a color-timing tweak, and largely for the better. One of the criticisms of the film and early discs was how “bright and sunny” the movie could look when a killer storm is raining down just a few feet away. Some effort has been made to darken the film just a little to mitigate that. You can still see the show, it’s not like what hit Twilight Time’s NOLD 90 disc, but enough to maintain a mood. There might be a little more blue, but reds and yellows still pop beautifully.

That said, they did add quite a bit of green for the opening “Going green” tornado. It was a bit jarring at first, one could argue they overdid it a tad trying to achieve the look de Bont always wanted for that opening sequence, but it does fit. I’ve seen plenty of green storms in my day. Greener now than before, it at least doesn’t look like a storm of scabby-faced Warrick Davises will rain down upon the film. It’s not that severe a push. The HDR10 grade handles the workload very nicely. Jo’s bright yellow Jeep and Bill’s red Dodge Ram pop beautifully. The shadows are excellent, black levels are deep and inky, and the image has amazing depth. All around a winning effort.

On the audio front, this 4K disc doesn’t offer any legacy audio options - no 5.1 or 2.0 tracks, but a very effective brand-new Atmos mix. And this is new, it is not the same as Turbine’s mix from three years ago. To start, I’m going to just focus on this new Atmos mix for a minute which apparently also had input from de Bont. It’s a true wall-to-wall banger! The opening tornado is a great indication of what’s coming through the rest of the film. Dialog is well prioritized in the Front/Center channels, there were some lines that felt like they got softer, but that was all extraneous utterances, nothing major or plot-driven lost. The steak and eggs scene at Aunt Meg’s and her slaughtered cows is a lovely example of subtle surround usage with the bustling sounds of chipped glasses, cracked plates, and our merry band of storm chasers feasting. 

But for the big Tornado chases, this mix hits everywhere it counts. Plenty of surround imaging through the channels drifting throughout the sides and rears and into the height channels. Just like the theater, that first tornado chase in the yellow Jeep really highlights all of the work put into delivering pinpoint effects while giving you some thundering LFE in the subs. The third chase with all of the hail and debris was especially effective in delivering wall-to-wall immersion. I did notice some new effects added here and there, the most notable was some instantaneous lightning crashes early when Bill and Jo first reconnect. Not a terrible sound, not distracting, but it’s an obvious addition.

Now the elephant in the room, how does this Atmos compare to Turbine’s Atmos track from three years ago? That’s harder to answer directly because both are excellent 5-Star tracks, in my opinion. They both accomplish the same goal just slightly differently. There are areas where Turbine’s track pumps more volume and strength into some effects with more LFE rumble, and then there are times when this new Atmos track does that but in a different scene. For example, the first tornado chase when the yellow Jeep goes into the gully and crashes into the bridge. I thought the Turbine Atmos offered a little more rumble in the subs earlier than this new track and gave a little more heft to the crashing sound effect of the Jeep hitting the bridge while maintaining a huge loud immersive experience. But then you scoot later into the film at the drive-in, I thought this new Atmos started giving us the floor-rattling sub-rumbles earlier when Bill sees the TV go on the fritz building the tension just a little bit faster. Then there are other parts where the two tracks felt almost identical, like the “sisters” waterspouts and the build-up for when they crash into and swirl around the truck. That is just a long way of saying both Atmos tracks are bangers and manage the film’s soundscape beautifully.

As for bonus features, we don’t see all of the old materials return, namely, we lose the History Channel Nature Tech feature and trailers, but that’s all. We do gain a nice new, albeit brief, interview with the now-retired Jan de Bont. It’s nice to hear his thoughts and feelings about the film all these years later, especially when it was such a difficult production. I wish it was a longer segment with him, but it’s certainly a nice new extra worth checking out. 

• Audio Commentary Jan de Bont and Stefen Fangmeier 
• The Legacy of Twister - Taken by the Wind (HD 15:14)
• Chasing the Storm: Twister Revisited (SD 28:58)
• HBO First Look: The Making of Twister (SD 14:04)
• Anatomy of a Twister (SD 8:34)
• Van Halen “Humans Being” Music Video (SD 3:37)

Twister is simply one of the all-time great storm disaster flicks. You get just enough characterization to care for the people on screen. There’s just enough humor that the film isn’t dreadfully dull nor is it so silly it can’t function. Jan de Bont directed a rollercoaster ride of a film with a bigger meaner force of nature ready to appear over the next hill. Now on 4K Ultra HD from Warner Bros. the film simply looks better than ever. Not a high bar considering past releases, but this is an excellent HDR10 transfer, any greenage misgivings aside. The new Atmos mix is a beast all its own. I wish bonus features had more meat on their bones, but the new de Bont interview serves as a nice introduction for this 4K release. The SteelBook is an okay piece of original art, but it’s not very exciting and rather uninspired so unless you’re a diehard fan of metal cases housing your movies, stick with the standard release - it's the same excellent disc at a lower price point. For Fans Only.