For decades, I’ve heard moviegoers dismiss blockbusters as nothing more than excuses for elaborate visual effects. Most of the time, this is hyperbole. In the case of FanIt’s 100% true.
As detailed in this 2020 article at The Bell, Fan didn’t begin its life as a story about daring storm chasers. Director Jan de Bont didn’t grow up as a boy in the Netherlands dreaming of the day he could capture the majesty and terror of tornadoes on screen. The whole film began when Steven Spielberg in the mid-1990s, they wondered whether computer effects had progressed to the point where they could create a convincing CGI tornado.
He hired the special-effects wizards at George Lucas’s Industrial Light & Magic to film a test. At the time, “the company had never attempted anything like replicating a force of nature.” Their proof of concept was so convincing that several studios immediately wanted to back the film—even though there was no film at all. All that was left was a test reel of a tornado throwing farm equipment at a semi-truck.
“The minute we took that picture into the studio and they saw it, they said, ‘Okay. We want to do that,’” he said. Fan producer Kathleen Kennedy in 2015. “We didn’t even have a script yet!”
This doesn’t sound like the origin story of a cinematic classic. But Fan was an immediate success upon its release in the summer of 1996. It was the second biggest hit of the year, behind only Independence Day. And in the years that followed, it became the favorite of its time, not to mention a staple of cable television with a fanbase loyal enough to deserve it a sequel almost 30 years later. Looking at the film today, Fan contrasts so much with the modern generation of big-budget films that it’s not hard to understand how a film conceived as a special effects showcase became a cross-generational favorite.
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Ironically, the film’s complete lack of inspiration beyond Spielberg’s daydreaming gives Fan a unique quality that makes it stand out from most modern films of its scale. Today’s summer blockbusters are typically sequels, remakes, or adaptations. They are either based on something or are inspired by something. They’re pandering to the audience; they’re playing with the audience’s knowledge of the existing source material; they’re exploiting nostalgia — like, say, people’s feelings for the original material. Fan in 2024.
Fanon the other hand, it is not based on anything. Its co-writer Michael Crichton He later said that he and his collaborator Anne-Marie Martin were inspired by a PBS documentary about tornado chasers and the storyline of Howard Hawks. Your Girl Fridayin which a newspaper editor and a reporter who used to be husband and wife must put aside their differences to get the crime story of the century. But you don’t need to know anything about any of these movies, or about tornadoes — or literally anything — to understand Fan. At a time when so many blockbusters feel like quizzes, when they come with homework assignments that are practically prerequisites for proper viewing, Fan remains a film whose complete plot synopsis can be summed up in its one-word title.
If you need more than a “twister” to summarize the plot: Bill Paxton It is Helen Hunt stars as Bill and Jo, estranged husband and wife storm chasers who collaborated on a new tornado measuring device called “Dorothy” but never completed it before they split up. Bill tracks down Jo one last time to get her to sign the divorce papers so he can start his new life as a humble TV meteorologist. He even brings along his new fiancée Melissa (Jami Gertz).
Jo is particularly obsessed with tornadoes because they took her father’s life when she was a child — a tragic story told in surprisingly intense detail throughout Fan‘s opening sequence. Hoping that Bill will help her finally get Dorothy off the ground, she hesitates and tries not to sign the paperwork. She also shows Bill a working prototype of Dorothy that her team is about to deploy during a wave of intense storms. Caught up in the excitement of trying to get Dorothy to fly, Bill joins the crew and inevitably reconnects with Jo as the storms swirl around them.
It’s not Shakespeare, but it’s amazing how fresh a big-budget movie about adults with adult problems (marital conflicts, needing to sign documents, tornadoes destroying your aunt’s house) feels today. Yes, Fan focuses primarily on ILM’s digital tornadoes, and yes, the dialogue rarely rises above the level of single-word exclamations shouted over the sound of wind machines (“Right! Left! Wreckage!!”) Yet the simple fact that Fan is about a struggling couple in a difficult marriage, making it feel bravely adult compared to the simplistic stuff being released every week during the summer now.
Bill and Jo don’t just fight, like Hildy Johnson and Walter Burns from Your Girl Fridaythey are clearly still into each other, another element that makes Fan feels like a product of a bygone (and dare I say superior) era of filmmaking. Modern blockbusters are so asexual, so as not to offend anyone or limit the film’s potential appeal to every possible age and demographic. Fan it is a lust movie. Hunt spends most of the movie running around in the rain in a thin white tank top. There are unnecessary shower scenes. In almost every sequence, Bill and Jo are thrown into physical proximity and do that thing that happens in movies where two people who don’t want to admit they want to kiss end up with their faces too close and then have to awkwardly pull apart without exchanging spit.
Like this!
Note Paxton’s deeply suggestive delivery of the line “I want that” right after he and Hunt almost kiss. He’s talking about a plate of home-cooked food. But he’s also no talking about food. It’s all so shameless… but Hollywood movies have forgotten how fun it is to be so shameless.
Help that Fan There are actors of Paxton and Hunt’s caliber to deliver those lines. Neither of them were big names when they were cast as the film’s leads; Paxton was a perennial supporting actor and Hunt was known as one half of the show’s central couple. Crazy for You. The real stars here were the tornadoes themselves, which overshadowed Paxton and Hunt on the movie posterand to a lesser extent Spielberg and Crichton reuniting after the success of Jurassic Park and the hit TV drama Emergency Room. Twister’s marketing also heavily promoted that it came from Bont, the director of Speedwhich became a surprise hit two summers earlier with a similar formula of attractive B actresses with smoldering sexual tension, an ingenious concept, and top-notch effects and practical stunts.
With Spielberg, Crichton, de Bont and the magic of ILM as the main attractions, Fan was free to surround Paxton and Hunt with a large cast of supporting actors. Cary Elwes, who had already made his name in comedies like The Princess Bride, Sensational photos!It is Robin Hood: Men in Tightsplayed the main non-weather villain, a rival storm chaser named Jonas. Veteran actress Lois Smith stepped up to play the lead role of Jo’s Aunt Meg. Jo and Bill’s team included familiar faces and future stars such as Jeremy Davies, Todd Field, Alan Ruck and a young Philip Seymour Hoffmanwho steals most of the film through his youthful enthusiasm for every single thing that happens on screen.
All of these elements add up to a clever formula: Good actors and impressive special effects from ILM. Some of the twists look a little less convincing than they did in 1996, but having seen this movie in the theater, I can personally confirm: Back in the day, Fan was a hit on the big screen.
And yet, I did not love Fan when I saw it in 1996, and I don’t particularly like it today. Paxton and Hunt’s banter, and the endless parade of storms, get a bit tiresome and repetitive. (Also for all the supposed sexual tension between the characters, the actors supposedly had much more real tension off camera.) Even with this amazing cast, Fan feels like a film conceived as a showcase for emerging effects technology first. It contains memorable moments, but this is one of those films that is like a varnished B-movie, both in terms of the type of film and its quality.
Anyway, I totally understand why a lot of people love it. Fanespecially today. It doesn’t look or sound like the kind of blockbusters we have anymore. Even though Fan It’s not quite a classic, we could use more movies like this — maybe with a little more emphasis on the story and less on the particle physics.
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