Here are five quick observations of how Twister did not depict a real story:
- The tornados in the movie whipped quickly back-and-forth like a dogs tail. Real tornados do follow more of a patterned path. In Oklahoma, they will almost always travel from southwest toward the northeast, taking more of a horizontal line in the northern part of the state and more of a vertical line in the south. While a tornado can turn, turns should not be depicted as whipping turns or zigzags.
- Chasing a tornado is not as easy as shown. Everywhere Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton turned, they were in the path of increasingly more powerful cyclones. In reality, there is a greatly reduced chance that a storm chaser could find this many tornados during a single chase.
- Debris doesn't exactly fly that way. Everything that was sucked into the wind and then tossed back out does not do so in such a calculating manner, and is not as easily identifiable at the time. In the process, especially in more powerful storms, things get mangled and smashed, ripped apart and twisted. Combines and tractor trailers probably would not have been thrown out in complete pieces (let alone cows).
- Why did every funnel appear to be five feet away? Our two protagonists were always able to stay ahead of these storms, in spite of the storm being at the edge of the pavement, right next to their truck, at the very next telephone pole. Seriously, the final tornado was literally sucking the barn from the ground, piece by piece, as the characters supposedly ran out of the other end (taking time to shut the door behind them, by the way).
- Real storm chasers might know a little more about staying safe. Nevertheless, Bill, Jo, and crew find themselves running through corn fields with debris hurling at them, standing in an auto repair pit, or lashing themselves to water pipes with leather belts, but hardly ever do they protect their heads, shield their eyes, or even squint against the debris. In real life, wouldn't all sorts of things be pelting them, stinging them, and knocking them unconscious?