Twister

Twister (1996) is Jan de Bont's disaster movie, and you can watch it online on iFILM. A crew of storm chasers tears across the plains of Oklahoma, trying to plant sensors straight inside a tornado.

Jo Harding (Helen Hunt) is fixated on reading a twister from the inside out. Her device, nicknamed Dorothy, is built to scatter hundreds of sensors into the funnel and buy people a few extra minutes of warning. Her almost-ex-husband Bill (Bill Paxton) shows up to sign the divorce papers, having quit chasing years ago, but the prairie sky pulls him right back in. Behind them rides a slick corporate rival, Jonas, in matching black trucks with a stolen design. A young Philip Seymour Hoffman turns up among the chasers.

Michael Crichton and Anne-Marie Martin wrote the script, and Industrial Light & Magic handled the storms, a real leap in digital effects for the mid-nineties. Flying cows, torn-off roofs, a truck lifted into the air. The film set the template for weather blockbusters that followed. Stream Twister (1996) online on iFILM.