(Credits: Alamy)
Fri 22 August 2025 21:15, UK
There’s often a tendency when you’re a little older to look back on things and be overtly nostalgic.
To believe new, shiny versions of things that existed in our youth couldn’t possibly match the original and are a total waste of time. Usually, it isn’t, but it absolutely is the case when you compare 2024’s Twisters to the 1996 movie Twister starring Bill Paxton.
Don’t get taken in by the fact that the newer movie starring Glen Powell and Daisy Edgar-Jones currently has a 90% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes compared to the Paxton version, which sits at just 58%. It’s a trap. If you watch the two films one after another, which I did only last week, you will realise that the remake—and it is a remake, despite many believing it’s a sequel—is a horrendously cheesy, badly acted, horrifically soundtracked, cheap knock-off of a proper ‘90s blockbuster.
The storyline is essentially the same. Many of the scenes are the same. The only real difference is that they’ve shoehorned in some trendy references to YouTube influencers, which they abandon after about 20 minutes, and set the whole thing to unlistenable Deep South country-pop-dance music. It’s abysmal.
The ‘90s film, which stars the likes of Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Helen Hunt, isn’t an amazing movie by any means, but it is a great Sunday afternoon, turn off your brain and call Dominos to save you from your hangover film. And Bill Paxton, who sadly died far too young back in 2017, is a big reason behind why it works so well as the dependable, slightly troubled, handsome lead. It also has flying cows in it, which is ace.
Paxton was something of an expert when it came to appearing in these kinds of films. Big budget, uplifting storyline, edge-of-the-seat stuff; movies like ‘Will Smith punches aliens in the face’ mega-hit Independence Day, submarine thriller U-571, and real-life astronaut drama Apollo 13. All features that you can properly get lost in: a dose of escapism while clutching some snacks and wincing now and again at the all-American dialogue and outlandish displays of patriotism.
He was even in three ‘Arnie’ movies, and what a trio to be in, with not just the original Terminator but Commando and True Lies too. That’s aside from James Cameron casting him in two other absolutely enormous films, the ‘Xenomorphs spit acid at spacemen’ thriller Aliens in 1986 and ‘there’s loads of room on that door’ accused disaster flick Titanic just over a decade later.
Paxton actually holds the amusing if somewhat dubious honour of being the only actor in Hollywood to have been killed onscreen by the Alien, the Terminator and the Predator. In fact, he was also an authority in onscreen deaths. A deeper dive into this reveals him to be one of the most bumped-off people to have worked in the industry, meeting his maker in variously inventive ways in no less than 20 different films.
They include being hacked to death with an axe, shot in the stomach while playing pool, burned to death by sunlight and being punched too hard in the face by Schwarzenegger for saying how attractive Jamie Lee Curtis is.
While his time was tragically cut short, he appeared in films that will be watched for all time, there’s no doubting that, even if many of them were mindless action romps. As he once told The Guardian, “My biggest disappointment is not getting to do the romantic roles I always dreamed of. But I’ve had a pretty good career. And you know what? We’re grist for the mill out here, and if I quit doing this, there’s ten guys ready to take my place.”
That may be the case, but he was a presence to reckon with, and with his talents would probably have charmed his way through a romantic comedy too.
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