Forces of Nature at 25: Yes, Ben Affleck and Sandra Bullock Made a ’90s Rom-Com

If you take a look at almost anyone’s list of the best movies of 1999, you’re probably not going to find many romantic comedies, and even fewer if you’re looking for movies about adults. It might look rosier from today’s vantage, when rom-coms are theatrically released even less frequently, but almost every famous movie romance from the most revered movie year of the past 30 years is about teenagers (She’s All That; 10 Things I Hate About You), pretending to be a teenager (Never Been Kissed) or acting like an impetuous teenager (Runaway Bride). This leaves Forces of Nature in the unlikely, ill-fitting position of the adult rom-com in the room.

A quarter-century after its release, Forces of Nature has become a curious blip on the filmographies of its stars, Ben Affleck and Sandra Bullock, though in less resilient careers it could have been part of a downward trajectory (or, for less popular stars, a high point; it made only a little bit less money than Drew Barrymore’s Never Been Kissed, and significantly more than 10 Things I Hate About You, which came out two weeks later). Bullock would score a couple of her biggest hits in the new century and win an Oscar a decade later; Affleck would have bigger ups and downs, but at this point he’s pretty been much grandfathered into whatever remains of a star system. They’ve both made enough movies by now that many people might not realize they did one together.

The characters they play in Forces of Nature appear almost designed to reinforce this confusion by playing to distorted, disorienting versions of their respective types. Affleck is closer to his usual, the straitlaced handsome guy working within the system, though this Ben – that’s his character’s name, too! – has a touch of frustrated artist, sporting the entirely made-up job of jacket-blurb-writer for a publishing company (that’s work for a marketing or editorial assistant; the lack of curiosity screenwriters exhibit about how or why people write in other industries is, as ever, stunning). On his way from New York to Georgia for his wedding to Bridget (Maura Tierney), he meets Sarah (Sandra Bullock), a plainspoken free spirit with some of Bullock’s patented approachable-girl-next-door energy, but with an overlay of freewheeling eccentricity (which is to say eye makeup). When a minor plane accident cancels their flight and puts Ben way off the idea of flying, they team up for a journey that also involves, yes, trains, as well as automobiles, with some It Happened One Night-style bus rides and fake coupling thrown in for good measure.

It Happened One Night features one of the most durable rom-com formulas ever devised, something that might not register immediately on the basis of Forces of Nature. But the movie has one thing going for it, which is also something that makes it kind of bad: It is a romantic comedy that looks very much like a movie from 1999. Not a specific movie from 1999 (which it already is); it doesn’t particularly resemble the Fincher greens of Fight Club or the deadpan drabness of Being John Malkovich or the bleached-out glare of Three Kings. But it does look like a music video. It does look like one of those imitation-Tony Scott directors Jerry Bruckheimer would hire to direct an action movie. I haven’t seen the movie remake of the The Mod Squad since it came out, but I bet it looks a little like that.

Bronwen Hughes, a Welsh director who helmed several episodes of The Kids in the Hall as well as the Nickelodeon Movies adaptation of Harriet the Spy (and who later became one of those genre polymaths in the Peak TV era), is clearly trying to strut her stuff, and for a while, the sheer visual business of Forces of Nature makes for a fascinating experience. Even before the Netflix age of ultra-clean over-bright lighting, romantic comedies of the 1990s were more baseline competent than visually arresting, so it’s a kick to watch one with major stars where the camera keeps pushing into their faces, hovering around them with handheld jitteriness, regarding them from canted angles. At one point, terribly rendered CG raindrops fall in slow motion. A hurricane looms down in Georgia, and to the movie’s credit, it looks like, if not necessarily a real hurricane, certainly a hurricane in a disaster movie more than a hurricane in a rom-com.

This would all work better were it not in service of nonsense – if the lovely location-shot scenery when Ben and Sarah climb up to the roof of their stopped train (!) while it chills out on a massive bridge (!?) were backdropping something that it would make sense for a human being to do, or that conveyed some kind of greater yearning than Ben feeling nagged by his attraction to a woman who is not his wife, not his type, and yet… there’s something about her, and so on. That’s a great backbone of a bittersweet rom-com (and to even the score, the movie has Bridget experience doubt of her own back in Georgia), but all the quasi-lyricism swirling around the movie makes the comedy look all the floppier and sweatier; romance farce favors a kind of precision that’s intentionally jettisoned here. And as good as both Affleck and Bullock can be, they don’t produce the movie-star sparks that could potentially upstage the movie’s look.

Come to think of it, Bullock and Affleck might match better now; they’re both capable of affecting a kind of world-weariness, despite an additional 25 years of living their rarified lifestyle. Forces of Nature very much strands them at the tail end of the ’90s, making them seem downright ill-suited for the decade that birthed both of their careers. It seems to want to be a Romance for the ’90s, in style and Gen-X-angst substance; Ben spends much of the movie fretting over whether happy long-term commitment is even possible, and as in glossy generational statements like Reality Bites, his “bad” job is more cushy and cutesy than the movie lets on. The visual texture of Forces of Nature more closely resembles other 1999 movies than any rom-com I can think of, even its youth-culture yearmates with charmingly insta-dated Gap-and-Delia’s fashions. Attitudinally, though, it feels lost, like its currency was evaporating as they made it, until the movie reveals itself as a bizarre reverse Graduate: Rather than sitting in unsettling contemplation of how actually happy his seeming triumph is, this movie’s Ben spends the whole movie stewing until he looks on the bright side of life, to the point where even his would-be dalliance turns sentimental. Plenty of white male angst from more acclaimed ’99 movies would look pretty self-indulgent years later. Forces of Nature was prescient, if self-defeating, in admitting that maybe all that strife was no big deal.

Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including Polygon, Inside Hook, Vulture, and SportsAlcohol.com, where he also has a podcast. Following @rockmarooned on Twitter is a great way to find out about what he’s watching or listening to, and which terrifying flavor of Mountain Dew he has most recently consumed.