The late, great Bill Paxton once called tornadoes “one of the most primordial forces on the face of the earth; a force so powerful and so concentrated it can rip the asphalt off a six-lane highway. It can hurl a freight train hundreds of yards from its tracks. And it can even destroy an entire town. At the same time, a tornado is one of the most awe-inspiring sights one can witness in nature, full of majesty and mystery.” He didn’t say this in character as storm chaser Bill Harding in the 1996 movie Twister. He said it as himself, Bill Paxton (the next line in this epic monologue is a Troy McClure–style “I’m Bill Paxton”), in the preshow video for the iconic Twister … Ride It Out attraction at Universal Studios Florida.
Ride It Out is a misnomer because the attraction wasn’t a ride at all. It was an atmospheric practical-effects show on a soundstage, simulating an EF-4 tornado touching down at a drive-in, just like one does in the film. This was at a time when Universal was still committed to making attractions about moviemaking, rather than just placing guests in the fictional worlds of the movies themselves, and the result was a creatively ambitious display of practical effects on a huge scale, complete with wind, rain, lightning, thunder, fire, felled trees, downed power lines, a flying cow, and a huge “twister” made of liquid nitrogen and steam. Still, it wasn’t a ride.
The attraction tragically closed in 2015 to make way for a lame screen-based simulator ride starring another natural disaster, Jimmy Fallon, and though I mourned its loss, I also dreamed about what might have been if it actually were a ride. Now my dreams have been realized with Twisters in 4DX. I’m here to tell you that there is no “best” format for viewing this long-awaited sequel in theaters, but there is a perfect format for riding it.
First, if you didn’t heed my advice earlier this year about seeing Dune: Part Two in 4DX and don’t know what I’m talking about, 4DX is a theatrical format in select cinemas, where seats are equipped to move, jostle, vibrate, lift, dip, and occasionally attack you with water, air jets, a back-punching mechanism, and what my moviegoing companion referred to as a “little tickler” near the ankles. In my experience having seen four 4DX films (amounting to 16DX), the more aggressive, full-contact effects are deployed sparingly, if not tastefully, so don’t let them turn you off from the whole concept. The theater is also equipped for lightning flashes, rising fog, and huge gusts of wind, which go absolutely perfectly with this material. So perfect that you need to run, not walk, to see Twisters in 4DX. Here’s why.
Beep, beep, you are entering spoiler-town; this is your final warning.
The scares hit harder
The Twister movies straddle many genres at once, and one of them is monster movie. The tornados operate here in the same vein as the shark from Jaws, or like kaiju. Townsfolk run, scream, and hide as winds tear roofs off buildings and smash cars into each other. The opening scene of Twisters is particularly harrowing in 4DX as the effects build along with the onscreen action, leading to the brutal touchdown of an EF-5, which attacks protagonist Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and picks off her college friends one by one. In moments when a character grips something for dear life to ground themselves, I found myself doing the same to my armrests as my chair teetered back and forth. And when a character gets sucked away by the tornado, the chair lurched in sync. When flying metal rips through Kate’s leg, a dart of air burst out of the right side of my headrest, right past my ear. When a car off-roads into tall country grass, the ankle-ticklers licked at the backs of my legs.
The most impressive 4DX effect is the seats’ range and fluidity of movement; they can lift and tilt the audience gently with a soaring drone shot over wind farms and fields of wheat, or they can completely toss you back and forth like a mechanical bull. After each big set piece, once the seats calmed back down, the audience around me gasped, laughed in relief, and went “Woo!” just like the movie’s storm-chaser hobbyists. That collective sensation, of fear and thrill and relief, is every reason why you go see this type of blockbuster in a theater.
It’s a meteorological good time
I am now convinced that the best movies to see in 4DX are weather-related, because the elements (and their corresponding effects) truly make the movie feel like it’s leaping out of the screen at you. For years, theaters tried to make “RealD 3-D” happen. It was never going to happen. Those glasses were ill-fitting, they darkened the screen, and they felt like an extra barrier between me and the action, rather than bringing the action closer. We’re seeing less of that nowadays, and I’m grateful. I much preferred watching Avatar: The Way of Water in 2022 in IMAX over watching Avatar in 3-D in 2009. I think I would have really loved it in 4DX, though.
4DX doesn’t require you to wear plastic glasses or suffer through muddy projection to get those pop-up thrills, and they’re firing on all cylinders in Twisters. The seats rumble and vibrate with the tornadoes’ ominous thunder. Lightning flashes in the corners of the auditorium in sync with the onscreen storm. The armrests have a button you can use to turn the water effects off, but I highly recommend leaving them on, because the occasional jet spray or puff of mist totally makes it feel like there’s a little ’nado in the room spitting at you. Best of all are the theater’s wind effects, which really surround you. At one point during the movie’s climax, the wind blew a piece of popcorn out of my hand. Now that’s what I call immersion.
It just makes sense dramaturgically
The ante-upping proposition at the heart of this sequel comes in the form of Glen Powell’s character, Tyler Owens, a country boy–scientist–YouTuber who brands himself as a “tornado wrangler.” There’s a running gag about him peddling T-shirts with a cartoon version of him riding a twister like a bucking bull. His philosophy toward life and tornadoes is “You don’t face your fears. You ride ’em,” to the point where he buckles a seatbelt harness as he rides into a tornado, like he’s riding a coaster. So it’s invigorating to ride alongside him in 4DX, living out the movie’s message, rather than just watching from afar, through a screen, like Tyler Owens’s YouTube subscribers. That’s the Twisters difference.
It enhances the movie’s strengths enough to make the shortcomings feel extra-small
Twisters is no Twister. As Alison Willmore put it in her review, “If Twister is the thrifted mall find, Twisters is the sweatshirt made by the DTC brand that touts its use of century-old manufacturing processes on Instagram with a fit that is universally unflattering.” Intellectually, I agree with the comparison. This movie is at war with its own inherent good time, particularly when it comes to the protagonist’s forced, disingenuous “trauma plot” and how it cowardly hints at climate change without ever calling it out.
However, this was not my experience of Twisters. In 4DX, it’s an absolute hoot and a holler, a moviegoing experience much more aligned with Powell’s character than with Edgar-Jones’s morose one. Willmore argued that “Twisters needs to be either smarter or dumber.” Twisters in 4DX looks that challenge right in the eye, revs its engines, cracks a grin, does double finger-guns, and says, “Dumber it is!” The most thrilling parts of the movie get cranked so high that when they die down and segue into more downbeat scenes, the audience coasts right through in good spirits, still buzzing off the adrenaline.
Daisy Edgar-Jones is really quite bad in this. She is not convincingly smart, nerdy, human, or southern. Powell is so charismatic that just the way he looks at her (mostly) convinces us that her character is worth paying attention to. In the one scene where she’s expected to cry and get emotionally vulnerable, she really looked like she was forcing those tears. But none of that matters when Powell is firing a rocket and you’re literally feeling it whoosh past your head. The audience at my screening was quick to laugh at the movie’s lightest, lamest jokes during the movie’s quieter scenes, the same way you get the giggles on a thrill ride. It lifted all ships.
It keeps the spirit of Twister … Ride It Out alive
Bill Paxton passed away at 61 on February 25, 2017. Only five days later, like a sneak in the night, Race Through New York Starring Jimmy Fallon soft-opened in the space where Twister … Ride It Out used to be. For nearly 20 years, millions of visitors were greeted by Paxton in those halls. As he put it, “The twister is not just a weather condition. It takes on a life of its own, becoming an entity, a demon spirit, a colossus bent on destruction. By the end, there’s only one thing you can do — hold on for your life.” That attraction is now long gone and replaced by a fool’s grotesquerie, which made Twisters even more resonant. If you’re a Universal Studios head (like a Disney Adult but cooler), you’ll know what I mean. Seeing a movie on a screen is one thing. Seeing a tornado on a soundstage is another. But I could feel the spirit of Bill Paxton smiling down on the Times Square 4DX theater where I saw Twisters after I actually rode it out. I could almost hear his voice echoing in my ear, saying those immortal postshow words over the PA: “Thank you for surviving Twister. This is Bill Paxton. Have a great day at Universal Studios Florida!”
