The following article contains minor spoilers for Twisters.
Not much happened at first. I’ve preached the gospel of 4DX before: with the right movie, the format’s simulator-style gyroscopic chairs, water effects and smell-o-vision elevates the blockbuster movie-going experience into a new form of thrill ride entertainment. Such is why its stock is on the up in the age of streaming and dwindling box office returns, with 4DX ticket sales reaching new heights in the U.S. last year. Top Gun: Maverick, which places the viewer in the cockpit of a fighter jet for at least two-thirds of its runtime, is precisely the sort of film that benefitted from mechanised immersion, and so its high-flying action translated exhilaratingly to the format. But here I was, watching Twisters, the 4DX version of which has been widely evangelized on social media, and nothing was really happening. It was tame. A spritz of water here and there, sure. A bit of gentle rocking. Hardly the mettle-testing theme park ride that so many online had promised.
And then—as Philip Seymour Hoffman first described the experience of finding oneself in the all-spinning, gluttonous stomach of a tornado—we entered the “suck zone.”
On screen, Daisy Edgar-Jones’ Kate and her valiant storm-chasing colleagues were thrown around like rag dolls, their pickup truck thrown to the side like a Tonka toy. Sparking powerlines were plucked out of the ground like stubborn hairs. And my seat began to…move. There’s an understatement: my seat began to violently shake and convulse, like a space shuttle on re-entry. As I grunted and my jowls rippled, like Homer Simpson before me, I morphed into Richard Nixon. I craved a lap bar with every bump and jolt that sent me careening into the upper atmosphere. Thank god I hadn’t actually bought that Tango Ice, I thought, because it would surely be on the floor by now, or all over my lap, another environmental effect thrusting the movie’s globulous hailstorm into the real world.
That’s essentially how the rest of Twisters in 4DX bore out: a gentle car ride interspersed with rip-roaring set pieces that take you to hell and back, clutching your rosary beads, muttering prayers under your breath, feeling incredibly sorry for the poor front-of-house assistant who will have to become deeply acquainted with the comestible rubble left behind.
It’s by far the most intense 4DX show I’ve ever experienced. It’s also one of the most technically impressive. The effects are brilliantly calibrated to each scene, be it in one of the aforementioned toupée-snatching tornado sequences or the many emotionally-driven quieter moments. When the seat gently tilts and sways with the movement of a drone shot that glides with the Oklahoma breeze, for example. Or as the seat rumbles to evoke the engine of Glen Powell’s storm-chasing truck. And when a thin mist of water spray hits you to simulate a trickle of rain — which, with the recent heat wave that has belatedly hit Britain like the scorching belch of an open oven, is actually quite pleasant. Then there are the big set pieces. The titular twisters. First Reformed auteur Paul Schrader described himself as emerging from the experience with a “full back massage.” Not to question one of America’s greatest filmmakers, but it would be better described as “total bodily annihilation.”
