From left: Daisy Edgar-Jones, Anthony Ramos and Glen Powell in “Twisters.”
Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures/Warner Bros. Pictures/Amblin Entertainment
[This story contains spoilers for Twisters.]
I missed the flying cow TwisterYou’re in good company. Director Lee Isaac Chung He said he didn’t notice the homage to the original series at first.
“Oh my goodness, everyone wanted there to be a cow in this movie,” Chung says. recently, The Hollywood ReporterHe was skeptical about including such literally trippy scenes in the film as an actual cow that gets caught in a tornado and slowly drifts in front of a car in the 1996 film, so the VFX team took on the problem themselves.
During the film’s climax, as an F5 tornado is on a collision course for the town of El Reno, Oklahoma, there’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot of a cow caught in the storm… or so it seems. “It’s the hardest thing to find,” Chung explains. “I only managed to find it because there was a piece of flying debris that had a weird pattern on it. I said, ‘Can you freeze that frame?’ I was looking at the shot frame-by-frame when we were doing the VFX review, and sure enough, there was a cow on that piece of debris.”
While it may not be what audiences were expecting, the flying cow-painted debris does appear in the film’s final act — and it’s a much more animal-friendly, and arguably more realistic, scene than the one in Star Wars. Twister. in Original by Jan de Bonta CGI cow passes in front of the windshield of a truck carrying stars Helen Hunt, Jami Gertz and the late Bill Paxton, a sight that’s enough to prompt Gertz’s character to finish a conversation on a comically large cell phone.
Sending actual cows, or rather VFX-esque ones, into a cyclone would have been too much for a spiritual sequel, so Chung went for as much scientific accuracy as possible. Daisy Edgar Jonesa vehicle for Glen Powell and Anthony Ramos. “All of the science elements of the tornado, we tried to get as accurate as possible,” he says. “We kind of pushed it. There are elements of science fiction. Kate’s (Edgar Jones) experimental ideas of what they were trying to do with the tornado are very speculative, but they are based in theoretical science.”
The experiment in question, in which Edgar Jones’ character tries to quell a tornado with a kind of green chemical bomb, is science fiction at this point, Chong points out, but what about the formation of the tornado, its effect on the film’s landscape, and the weather story? Apparently that’s a lot more accurate.
The ending, in which Edgar Jones’ character Kate finally seems free from her traumatic past and ready to resume her storm-chasing life, was described by Oscar-nominated Minari The director said he hopes the film will be one that audiences can relate to.
“What I want people to take away from this is the fear and equally the anxiety and trauma that I hear people talk about a lot,” Chong said. “I’ve experienced a lot of fear myself in my work and in my career. Minari “I had a lot of fears when I came into this project, so I hope that this film gives a sense of Kate’s journey and how she struggles with those fears and how she overcomes them.”
TwisterThe film “Winking Cow,” which features a cameo appearance by the winking cow, is now in theaters.
