For those who may need a refresher, “Twister” unfolds as an estranged couple, Dr. Jo Harding (Helen Hunt) and Bill Harding (Bill Paxton), reunite to finalize a divorce. However, as a record series of storms emerge, Bill is roped back into his former rag-tag group of storm chasers to help deploy “Dorothy,” a tornado research device that could help improve tornado warning systems and save lives.

Aside from Hunt and Paxton leading the way, de Bont assembled one heck of an ensemble, including Cary Elwes (“The Princess Bride”), Jami Gertz (“The Lost Boys”), Alan Ruck (“Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”), future “Tar” director Todd Field, and the late Philip Seymour Hoffman (perhaps best known for “Scent of a Woman” at the time). Looking back, it truly was an ensemble for the ages. One that could have included country music superstar Garth Brooks, it’s worth noting, but he passed because he didn’t want to play second fiddle to the movie’s real stars: the tornadoes. In any event, the humans on screen were just as compelling as what they were facing down, which is a big part of this movie’s secret sauce.

“It really showed the sort of things that you could do in digital,” Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) VFX supervisor Ben Snow told The Ringer in 2020. Snow was working as a digital effects artist at the time. ILM, dating back to its groundbreaking work on “Star Wars,” has long been held as the gold standard for visual effects in Hollywood. Naturally, they were brought on board to make these natural disasters through digital means.

ILM’s Habib Zargarpour worked with the company’s creative director Dennis Muren for 10 weeks to create the test footage that would prove this could be done. Zargarpour used software to create millions of tiny digital particles that he could manipulate to craft a CGI tornado. “You could script behaviors for every single particle. I was basically creating particles out of statistics. Forming some volume,” he explained to The Ringer.