‘Twisters’ Was a Spectacle That Missed a Huge Opportunity

Margaret Renkl

My husband and I went to see “Twisters” last week on what turned out to be the planet’s hottest day on record — breaking a record that had been set just the day before. We didn’t know that at the time, but it wouldn’t have been a wild guess. During the last 13 months, global temperatures have consistently blasted all records.

So far Nashville has mostly escaped the historic heat that keeps enveloping this country in waves of misery. We have also been spared the kind of severe weather that is the bread and butter of summer disaster movies. People seek escapist fare like “Twisters” in part to experience imaginatively the kind of danger that hasn’t reached them in ordinary life. If this movie had come out in 2020, when more than two dozen people in Middle Tennessee lost their lives to a powerful tornado, I’m not sure I would have had the heart to watch.

The first grown-up movie I ever saw in a theater was “The Towering Inferno,” but I’m not normally one for disaster movies. I wanted to see “Twisters” because I was curious about how it addresses climate change. Extreme weather events are on the rise. Headlines this summer have been filled with news of devastating hurricanes, droughts, flash floods and wildfires. If ever the time was right for Hollywood to take on the one disaster that affects us all, this is surely it.

Everyone is worried. Republican politicians may be all in on fossil fuels — their party’s platform made no mention of climate change, instead promising in all caps to “DRILL, BABY, DRILL” — but they are growing increasingly out of step with their own voters.

In a poll conducted between April 25 and May 4, the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication found that 62 percent of registered voters “would prefer to vote for a candidate for public office who supports action on global warming.” That number includes 47 percent of respondents who identified as a liberal or moderate Republican. Only 15 percent of registered voters believed the U.S. government “is responding well to global warming.”

Nevertheless, in more than two hours of extreme-weather depiction, the makers of “Twisters” opted to exclude even the tiniest nod to the chief driver of extreme weather. And they are sticking by that decision amid one of the most active tornado seasons in history. In an interview with CNN’s Thomas Page, the movie’s director, Lee Isaac Chung, said, “I just don’t feel like films are meant to be message-oriented.”

In principle, I agree. Much of the world’s great art resists reductive interpretation. What is the Mona Lisa really “saying” to viewers? Is there a clear message to take from “The Waste Land”? If “Neither a borrower nor a lender be” is such great advice, why did Shakespeare put these words in the mouth of a fool?

But unlike “Minari,” Chung’s quiet, transcendently beautiful 2020 art house film, “Twisters” is a humdinger of a summer blockbuster that delivers exactly what theatergoers want in an action film: plenty of explosions, destruction, high-speed chases and heroism, all with a dash of wit and sexual tension thrown in. It is not — and does not aspire to be — high cinematic art.

It is, however, a golden opportunity to talk about what scientists know and don’t know about how climate change might be affecting the formation, strength, frequency and geographic distribution of tornadoes, or why they now tend to develop in groups.

There’s a lot of talk in this movie about how tornadoes are getting bigger and more frequent, how they’re popping up in places, like New York City, that don’t historically experience the meteorological conditions that would spawn a tornado. There’s no talk at all about the science of global climate breakdown and what it will mean for people in the path of its destruction. That’s all of us.

It would not have stripped one bit of screaming energy from one single truck-tossing tornado if these filmmakers had allowed their characters — who include, after all, research scientists and climatologists — to muse aloud about how climate change might be affecting their work. In between lines like, “We’ve never seen tornadoes like this before,” would it have hurt to introduce, however briefly, the idea that something much bigger than a tornado threatens the planet those scientists are studying?

I’m guessing the decision to exclude even a passing reference to climate change in a film about weather disasters has very little to do with cinematic art, or even with climate science, and everything to do with avoiding the cross hairs of political polarity. With movie attendance still far below prepandemic levels, who could blame the makers of “Twisters” for wanting to protect their film from the right-wing vigilantes targeting wokeness? I do. I can’t help it, I blame them.

I’m not arguing that Chung should have turned his 122 minutes of beautifully rendered cinematic escapism into an Anthropocene screed. But artifacts of popular culture have always had immense power to articulate changing attitudes, engage empathy and open firmly resistant minds. Think about how swiftly Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” changed attitudes toward the fragile natural world and led to new regulations of synthetic pesticides, or how Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” and John Prine’s “Paradise” expanded awareness of the environmental movement. A decade ago, the CBS drama “Madam Secretary” proved that even a single episode with a climate-based story line could significantly affect viewers’ understanding of the human costs of climate change.

This is why Percy Bysshe Shelley called poets “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” When art changes opinions or opens hearts, it changes the world as profoundly as any legislation does.

With MAGA politicians at every level denying that climate change even exists, real climate legislation is now nearly impossible to pass. And with the Supreme Court determined to quash all executive-branch efforts to address the changing climate, too, we seem to be at the mercy of artists to save us.

If only they would. In a missed opportunity the size of an F5 tornado’s debris field, we got no help from the makers of “Twisters.”