Headscratchers / Twister

• Where did Bill store his truck's cover?
  • I always figure that they left it on the side of the road.
• Am I the only one who got the impression that the Hardings hate Jonas *primarily* for being a huge jerk and *secondarily* for "selling out"? I mean, if he was anywhere as rude and arrogant when they were in the same lab as he is in the movie, he wouldn't have been a pleasant person to collaborate with. But it seems like every review of the film assumes the "selling out" is the main reason they hate him.
  • We don't really get an idea as to what Jonas was like before going out on his own. It was Bill who derisively said Jonas was in it for the money and not the science, and that Jonas had no instincts (as though "instinct" is somehow scientific). For all we know, Jonas could have been a perfectly nice guy that the others were always picking on, and now he gets to rub his success in their faces.
    • No way. According to Jo, Jonas was little more than a hanger-on, always waiting to see what Bill would do. The one time we see Jonas not following Bill's advice...
  • In reality, "sell-out" jerk or none, any storm chasing team worth its salt would WELCOME any help they could get in collecting data, and there's plenty of tornado to go around.
  • I figured that Jonas got said Corporate Sponsors behind the backs of the rest of the team, wanting to be a glory hog, even blatantly ripping off Bills design, and Bill & Jo are bitter about the fact that Jonas is essentially riding off of their ideas, probably got corporate sponsonship by using Bills design as a selling point, also it's subtly implied that Jonas had a thing for Jo, so Bills reasons for not liking him very much are explained a little more, maybe.
  • Most of this criticism stems from the old school TV Tropes attitude of 'well maybe the bad guy wasn't that bad' - essentially applying Draco in Leather Pants to the bad guys and Ron the Death Eater to the good guys. I get the sense that Jonas wasn't a team player and/or difficult to work with - given that Bill and Jo are friendly and work well with literally every other person shown in the movie. Jonas seems to be a reckless, dangerous amateur who luckily managed to get very far on someone else's ideas and research.
• How'd Bill's truck drive up a flight of stairs and emerge from a first floor window?
  • Maybe he fell through the already damaged floor.
  • Also, he entered the house side-on, meaning to go straight up/down the stairs they would have to be on the wall when the house is upright.
• Why the hell did they pick 1969 for Jo? There weren't any F5s in '69 - why not have Jo's tragedy happen during the 1974 Super Outbreak? At one point there were 16 tornadoes active at once. Or was it important that she be the ONLY one who knew somebody who died that year?
  • If they had used a real event, the writers might have felt constrained by the historical record and felt they had to set Jo's childhood in one of the real towns that was hit by the outbreak and then go through the trouble of reproducing what it looked like in 1974, including how it was damaged. If they had gone to that town to film, it might have upset locals who had survived the tornado and been seen as exploiting their tragedy. Having a fictional storm provided more creative freedom and less chance to accidentally offend and they may simply chosen the year Helen Hunt was six and gone from there. But setting it in 1974 certainly would have removed the anachronism of Jo's father referring to the Fujita scale before it existed.
  • The Jack Bickham novel Twister did exactly this - created a fictional town as an Expy of Xenia and had it hit by an F-5 during a fictional Super Outbreak just as Xenia was. It worked out completely fine. They could have easily set the original scene during the Super Outbreak. The speculation about the tornado's strength during the crisis was incredibly stupid anyway - if a tornado is bearing down on your family you won't give a shit if it's an EF-0 or an EF-5 — both are quite capable of killing you and you do the same damn thing in both cases: Get the hell to shelter! The only real differences in the EF scale is what flavor of debris the tornado leaves behind, not its lethality.
    • An EF-0 tornado is basically a very strong rotating breeze. It might tear some shingles off the roof, but that’s about it.
• What in the seven hells was Jo's dad actually doing in the intro? wooden door and adult male v F5 tornado obviously lost out, but everyone else was fine, why didnt he huddle up in the furthest solid corner with his family other than to give Jo this "tornadoes are assholes" motivation?
  • Whether or not they would've been sucked up into it was a matter of dumb luck. They could have just as easily wound up all dead. It's even possible that they're alive because he held the door down for just long enough. He took a risk to lower the odds against them as much as possible, and it worked - whether or not it would have worked anyways, we can't blame him much for not wanting to take that chance.
• The entire subplot of a "corporate sponsored" team doing tornado research was ludicrous on its face. Unless the corporation was a company that specialized in tornado sirens, they'd never make a profit off a bunch of raw tornado data - there's a good reason why Accuweather piggybacks off NWS data, after all. And even if they were, they'd sell them anyway whether or not they had tornado data - its only value was basic research and earlier warnings and more lives saved, and that can't be monetized. Now, there has been speculation on making "smart" tornado sirens that can read Doppler radar telemetry, detect rotation, and trigger themselves, but there's tons of problems with the idea - there's a reason it has yet to see the light of day - and it wouldn't apply to the movie's timeframe anyway.
  • Plenty of businesses sponsor specific types of scientific research because their owners/CEOs have a passion for the subject.
  • Corporate sponsorship is also sometimes done for the sake of good press coverage. The company looks good for supporting a cause and this benefits them from a PR point of view. At the time the movie was made, storm chasing was a pretty obscure department to go into - so whoever sponsored Jonas may have seen it as a good move because no one else was doing it.
• Why does Bill only have liability coverage on his truck? I get that he wasn't expecting to go into chasing again, but there are a few questions. I'm not sure about the laws in Oklahoma at the time, but most states require a vehicle to have full coverage if it's being financed. The MSRP on a 1996 Ram 2500 was around $20k. Given some extras and tax-title-license, let's call it $24k. So if Bill only has liability coverage, that means he paid cash for his truck, but somehow can't afford better insurance?
  • If Bill made a point of getting full coverage while he was stormchasing, he might have dialed it back on purpose as a statement (ultimately futile, of course) to himself "and the world" that he wasn't a stormchaser anymore.
  • Another possibility is that he was lying to Jo about the coverage. He clearly knew what she was thinking when she asked if he had full coverage on it (you can see it in his face when he responded that he knew exactly where Jo was going the moment she asked about the coverage, even before she said it was a beautiful truck). He might have lied and saying it was "liability only" to try to get her to not consider the possibility of using his truck, and that by making her think it was liability only, she might not decide to use it for the stormchasig.