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What is a twister? Another name for a tornado. What is a tornado? Imagine this, a rotating column of air, twisting around and around. Feel it. Imagine the winds with a speed of 200 miles per hour. Imagine it 100 feet wide, or about nine Honda Accords lined up bumper to bumper. Imagine it on the ground and reaching up to a thunderstorm thousands of feet above you. Usually it's whitish, like clouds, with the same reasons why clouds are whitish. You should know. If the twister has sucked in dirt and debris, it becomes darker and seemingly more diabolic.

But twisters have no conscience or guilt, no more than lightning or earthquakes. No matter what people do or don't do, these acts of nature will have their way and everyone had better keep out of it.

The central hang-up of stormchaser Jo Harding (Helen Hunt) is simply that—she needs someone to blame when a twister killed a person she loved. Near the end, when another twister sucks in and kills a rival stormchaser, in an enlightened state, Jo says, "Let it go. It's over."

The science of twisters is simple but fascinating, especially because of it's destructive tendencies. It's all air, I conclude. Or as Jo Harding said, "Windy."

Remember your high school physics. Cold air is heavier than warm air. That's how fog works. That's how an air conditioner works. That's how thunderstorms work. Cold air goes down, pushes up hot air. Multiply intensity by a power of ten. Add a factor for unstable air. Let water condense. A vortex will appear which will reach to the ground. Within the twister, there proceeds a terrible updraft, causing low pressure at ground level and creating the "suck" factor.

As the movie showed, there are two areas of potential destruction: within the twister and without. Outside the twister is the kind of chaos that everyone can expect, flying debris turned into deadly missiles. But inside is the spectacle: cows, tractors, uncles, barns, houses, Dorothy's, Ford four-wheel drives, and 20-ton trailers with the word "Inflammable" painted on its side. The suck factor.

This is the gem of the movie: a breakdown of logic, an entry into fantasy, albeit a destructive one. The laws of gravity are challenged. For once, we experienced the adventure that Oz gave to Dorothy decades ago. The magic of computer animation, causing mooing cows to fly, along with other things that man intended to stay on the ground, infused a contemporary meaning to TS Eliot's phrase, the suspension of disbelief.

Disbelief was way up there, hundreds of feet up in the air.

The movie is a long and redundant yet spectacular poetization of relationships. The twister as metaphor. The twister as drama. A couple is preparing for divorce, thus a stormy relationship. Add another love interest to produce a love triangle. No need for words, we know what will happen. Don't tell. Show. Romantic relationships are tornadoes by nature.

Indulge me.

Everything's fine at the start of the movie. Everyone's tending to their business. But the National Weather Service is predicting thunderstorms in Oklahoma, where Bill Harding (Bill Paxton) and his girlfriend, Melissa (Jamie Gertz), are zooming in their new truck to meet Bill's soon-to-be-ex-wife Jo Harding. Before the divorce papers can be signed, the thunderstorms come. Tension everywhere, the chase is on: who will get what?

The tornadoes which are so familiar to both Jo and Bill are terrifying for Melissa. When the going gets tough, Bill admits that he still cared for Jo. Melissa is crushed by the news, as if a two-storey Tudor house fell on her. When another tornado comes, Bill says to Melissa, "I'm going with Jo. Meet me in the motel." Melissa responds, "I won't be there." A moment of ambiguity, but we know what it means.

Jo and Bill go off and chase after a tornado, hoping to understand it and help people avoid its destruction. They manage to launch their own equipment pack inside a twister to transmit valuable scientific data about tornadic behavior. But the twister turns around and heads for them. The twister catches them: the final metaphor to Jo and Bill's relationship. They hang on together, through all the chaos and danger, all the dirt and anger around them. Their reward is a momentary vision of heaven: the inside tunnel of a twister reaching up into the clear sky above, sun shining.

The thunderstorm passes. They kiss. Applause.

"Melissa is like the audience," Jamie Gertz explained. "She knows absolutely nothing about tornadoes, so she's seeing all of this for the first time with them. They can use my character to learn everything, because she's constantly having everything explained to her. She's asking all the questions and commenting and, of course, screaming."

But, Jamie dear, I never screamed. I yey-ed and hurrah-ed and cool-ed but never aahrg-ed or yike-d.

Benjie, one of the guys I watched with, asked me about that night scene in the open-air movie carpark, which was playing the horror-movie "The Shining" when the tornado struck. "What does it mean?" he asked. I replied flippantly, "It's supposed to point out the horror of the movie."

Thankfully, there are no tornadoes here in the Philippines. As a non-Oklahoman myself, I can't only enjoy and applaud the horror that the movie brings. Fact: people die because of tornadoes. Fact: tornadoes cause unspeakable and expensive damage to the landscape.

Remember Joel Schumacher's The Lost Boys, about modern-day vampires? Jamie Gertz remembers that because she was the blood-sucking love interest in that movie. Now, that's horror. But Jamie's tornado movie is classified as action-adventure, a rollercoaster ride into fun, fun, fun.

Once, during a Signal Number Four Thypoon, I was in my home in Tiaong, Quezon. My father and I went out to make sure that the canals and gutters didn't jam up with debris. The rain was hitting my skin like pellets from a BB gun. I walked towards the middle of a flooded tennis court and looked up. The gurgling thunder clouds, the whistling and muscular wind, and the watery atmosphere, was a grand portrait of nature. And I was in the middle of it.

Of course, I had to get back inside the house or be hit by a flying roof.

How does it feel to be in front of a tornado? I will never know, unless I enroll in a BS Meteorology course in University of Oklahoma (OU) School of Meteorology. For 40 pesos, and according to director Jan De Bont, you can experience ten percent of the actual tornado experience right inside the movie house. True enough, during the peak of any tornado scene, the seats rumbled along with the fantastic audio effects. Though my logocentric mind doubts it, my ears swear they heard amidst the roar of the tornado, snatches of a tiger's macho growl and of a camel's aggressive yet strange low pitched moan.

As a warning, never watch this movie on video unless you have a 40-inch LCD screen and a digital surround-sound home theater system.

After the movie ended, me and my buddies filed out of the theater along with other movie-goers. I noticed that a lot of people were heading for the bathrooms: it was a scene I saw before, after watching Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List.

I call this phenomena a "no-piss movie," as in a movie which is so engaging that you can't chance missing any scene by going to the bathroom. In effect, people hold off their urinal feelings until the end credits start rolling.

Bill Paxton called the movie "one hell of a ride." Translated, a true Hollywood movie experience for the dedicated funster audience. The multimillion entertainment mantra: Grab their attention and never let go. This tornado movie is an ideal to which all big-budget Hollywood movies aspire to. Think True Lies. Think Jurassic Park. Think Speed. Bring us the paying audience to entertainment nirvana.

Amen. And thank you.