10 Most Underrated Disaster Movies Of All Time

Let’s set the record straight: Bill Paxton is awesome in everything. He just is. We all know him from Aliens (“Game over, man, game over!”) and we’ve all seen him in Apollo 13 and Titanic, but one film he doesn’t get due credit for is 1996’s Twister, a disaster film so extreme and wonderfully melodramatic it could just be one of the best escapist films of all time.

Following the characters of Ben Harding (Paxton), a veteran storm chaser, and Jo Harding (Helen Hunt), a meteorologist and Ben’s estranged wife, Twister sees the state of Oklahoma battered by a series of increasingly violent tornadoes. Desperate to stop the twisters’ damage, Ben, Jo and their team band together to conduct important research on the formation of the storms.

Sporting a strong supporting cast complete with Philip Seymour Hoffman, Cary Elwes and Jeremy Davies, Twister is break-neck entertainment at its finest. The characters are fun and the visuals are stunning, even when compared to more modern blockbusters. The plot itself may lean into the realm of too-silly and sometimes plain generic, but the action it provides is more than enough to make up for its short-comings.