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Product Description: The house rips apart piece by piece. A bellowing cow spins through the air. Tractors fall like rain. A 15000-pound gasoline tanker becomes an airborne bomb. A mile-wide 300 miles-per-hour force of total devastation is coming at you: Twister is hitting home. In this adventure swirling with cliffhanging excitement and awesome special effects Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton play scientists pursuing the most destructive weatherfront to sweep through mid-America's Tornado Alley in 50 years. By launching electronic sensors into the funnel the storm chasers hope to obtain enough data to create an improved warning system. But to do so they must intercept the twisters' deadly path. The chase is on!Format: BLU-RAY DISC Genre: ACTION/ADVENTURE/RACE AGAINST TIME UPC: 085391186311 Manufacturer No: 118631Amazon.com: Twister was a mega-million-dollar blockbuster--helmed by a director (Dutchman Jan de Bont) hot off another scorcher hit (Speed)--that flaunted state-of-the-art digital effects and featured a popular leading actress (Helen Hunt) who would win an Academy Award for her next film (As Good As It Gets). But ask anybody who's seen it and they'll tell you who the real star of Twister is: the cow. Not to give anything away, but the cow is one of those inspired little touches (like, say, Bronson Pinchot's career-making cameo in Beverly Hills Cop) that adds a touch of personality to a gigantic Hollywood production. The story is blown out the window after an impressive prologue in which Hunt's character, as a little girl, witnesses her daddy being sucked into a tornado. Basically, Hunt and Bill Paxton are thrill-seeking meteorologists chasing twisters in order to study them (and help warn people of them, of course) with a new technology they've developed. If you thought the Kansas tornado in The Wizard of Oz was every bit as scary as the Wicked Witch of the West, then this may be the movie for you. --Jim Emerson
Customer Reviews:
- Terrible Blu-Ray: Lets see, where do I start? Color banding, poor contrast, heavy film grain, soft focus and a lackluster True HD soundtrack. Warner Brothers should have never put this out like this. I remember the original SD DVD as looking pretty darn good. Not the usual quality we expect from Warner Bros. I'm thinking they are in a hurry to rush this stuff out so keep an eye on reviews before buying. What irritates me is that this Blu-Ray release received decent reviews from trusted sources on the internet. I don't see how they could have possibly missed these serious flaws. After reading some of these reviews here, I see the consumers obviously have not missed them.
- Extremely poor audio: This is the WORST sounding blu ray audio i ever heard. is this a defective transfer or did i get a bad disk ? have HIGH end 805/Polk setup and Audio especially uncompressed sounds mind blowing but the audio here was worse than any standard dvd. very poor quality, could hardly feel anything not loud, no dynamic range,lfe or anything in either dolby truehd or regular 5.1. when things were flying and crashing in the tornado i barely heard anything... surely a problematic transfer or Quality control issue
Above average video - So-so transfer to Blu-Ray: Having waited eagerly for this to be released on Blu-ray, I was somewhat disappointed in the quality of the transfer. Not only is the Blu-ray not particularly crisp compared to the better transfers such as, say, Road Warrior, I established by A/B-ing the Blu-ray and previous non-HD version in my Sony PS3 that the Blu-ray is actually softer looking in some respects than the previous version. So you might save your money and just stick with the version you probably already have.
- Campy? Yes. Far fetched? Not hardly!: What about the outbreak of tornados in the same area depicted in the film a week ago? 40 tornados over the same area in the span of 10 hours: that makes this movie look like a picnic. Still say it's not possible? There are people in tornado alley that will beg to differ.
- Twisted: I don't know if I would've forgiven this movie more if I hadn't had an amateur meteorologist with me when I saw it or not. But I did. And his constant interjections of "that would NEVER happen" got so annoying that I finally had to say:
"Hey, I never went to Weather School but I KNOW that couldn't happen!"
My hopes were also high since Michael Crichton's name was on the screenplay. But then again, so was his wife-at-the-time listed as a screenwriter.
But what really got me was that this Hollywood monstrosity had an opportunity to use the best sound and state-of-the-art visual effects to show the raw power and terrifying danger of a real tornado...and they instead chose to pay endless homages to THE WIZARD OF OZ. Have you ever been in a tornado? I have. Nobody's pausing to calmly and safely watch barnyard animals float by. This movie totally trivialized that stark terror.
Whatever tires were on that pick-up truck that Bill Paxton drove around with Helen Hunt and Jamie Gertz had to be magic: somehow houses and tanker trucks could be tossed around like crazy--but not that pick-up truck!
Storywise, you can also see everything coming from a mile off. I'll bet everyone can guess how the relationships will end within the first 20 minutes. Characters are so broad that I wondered if the two groups of scientists were in this movie or if they were the two competing summer camps in MEATBALLS. Of course the bad scientists--and they're bad because they drive new black vehicles--are going to suffer the most at the hands of nature. Of course the leads will have their happy ending. Of course the tornado will strike the drive-in movie theatre when Jack Nicholson sticks his face through the door in the clip from THE SHINING (I knew that was going to happen as soon as they showed the movie marquee).
If this movie had Jerry Bruckheimer or Michael Bay's name in the credits, I wouldn't be able to be so critical. I just expected more from Michael Crichton.
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