The Elephant in the Sky
What happens when a tornado movie dodges the biggest storm of our time?
My movie friends wondered when I proposed we see “Twisters”, the remake of a 1995 classic forever remembered for flying cows. I have never been first in line for a mainstream blockbuster dubbed with country music. But Twisters’ successful debut delivered much needed relief to a community stunned by covid and strikes, budgets diminished, haunted by 10-year old streamers. Good ol’ summer movies aren’t dead, and the industry may survive until 2025? I wanted to see for myself what it takes to get people into the cinema during this summer.
Eventually someone agreed to join me and over 123 minutes we witnessed tornados coming and going, not a single flying cow, a movie theater being shattered (more on that later) and an awkward love story implied by shy signals, like a taboo relationship in a 1950s movie. I confirm what has been written before1: Twisters excels in ticking the boxes for an easygoing blockbuster evening.
What struck me most wasn’t the burning tornadoes, nor the power drills screwing the heroes truck to the ground. Soon into it I started to wonder and could not stop until the credits started rolling: how can a 2024 movie tell a story about people battling the weather and still avoid mentioning climate change? During each ramble through weather physics I waited for the protagonists to connect the dots between increasingly frequent tornadoes and the elephant in the sky. But just as the lead actors never kissed, climate change was not officially happening on the screen.
Tornadoes and climate have a complex relation, but scientific consensus points towards tornadoes becoming more, not less of an issue.2 Twisters mentions an increased frequency of tornadoes, but tiptoes decisively around the larger context. Lee Isaac Chung, the Twisters director, openly admitted he avoided addressing Climate Change directly to make people embrace nature first and then hopefully trigger climate related thoughts in a second step.3 Chung is not alone in his cinematic carefulness on the issue. More than 90% of 250 movies from the last years failed the “Climate Change Reality Check” requiring at least one climate related plot point and at least one character to know about it.4
Chung pulls it off by treating Tornadoes like the big shark in “Jaws“: monsters emerging out of the blue for no reason, beasts in need to be tamed by the evergreen combination of human ingenuity and human recklessness. For Jaws, it's a diving cylinder detonated in the shark's mouth. In Twisters, it's a barrel with chemicals blown up right in the tornado's eye.5 In both cases, it is a technology fix employed by the hero against a villain emerging out of the blue.
Twisters' success at the Box Office in flyover states seems to confirm this strategy of avoidance.6 But it seems Chung himself was aware of the escapism he performed. In the best scene of Twisters, the actors take cover from an approaching super tornado within a small town cinema theater showing the classic “Frankenstein”. The tornado hits the cinema right in the moment when Frankenstein's Monster turns against its creator. The screen gets ripped apart, opening the frame to a roaring nature furiously destroying every piece of a midwestern town. Moviegoers cling to their seats while those unlucky enough to be in the front are sucked out of the theater into the maelstrom.
What did I learn from my Twisters experience? Escapist disaster movies still draw crowds, but as our reality inches closer to disaster, this genre's escapism may soon ring hollow. Tiptoeing around uncomfortable topics will soon turn into leapfrogging over growing puddles of reality. This may be easy for science-fiction but all-american disaster movies draw their relevance from the representation of everyday life, which will be increasingly affected by the fallout of a changing climate.
Going forward I think the avoidance approach may hold up for some sequels, but at some point, it has to fall apart. Writing scripts for Twister movies will become increasingly difficult. But it could also be entertaining to see the struggle of scriptwriters in maintaining the impression of midwestern realism while executing what is in fact a fantasy plot.
Future writers' rooms may well need some support and I am happy to help. Therefore I conclude with a number of proposals for upcoming installations of the Twister franchise:
"Twister: Tornado Island"
Logline: Nature's fury meets human ambition in a battle for survival.
Premise: Billionaire Harold Crane’s island research facility, designed to control tornadoes for clean energy, goes haywire when a rogue AI spawns massive, deadly storms. A diverse group of visitors, including Crane’s estranged daughter and a cynical meteorologist, must survive the island's collapsing labs and reach the control center to shut down the out-of-control experiment. As the storms intensify, they discover that stopping the disaster may require confronting their own inner turmoil.
"Twister: Tornado Alley"
Logline: The highway to hell just got a whole lot windier.
Premise: During the biggest tornado outbreak in history, a daredevil truck driver must transport a highly volatile experimental fuel across Tornado Alley. With a team of storm chasers as his escort, he races against time to deliver the cargo that could stop the storms – if it doesn't blow them all sky-high first.
"Twister: Colossus"
Logline: The ultimate storm demands the ultimate weapon.
Premise: In a world ravaged by city-destroying tornadoes, humanity’s last hope lies in colossal mechs called "Tamers." Maverick, a troubled pilot, is pulled from exile to team up with his estranged partner, Dr. Elena Reyes, to pilot a revolutionary new Tamer against an unprecedented "Hyper Twister." As they battle the massive storm threatening a megacity, they must also confront their unresolved past to stand a chance at saving the world.
"Twister vs. Volcano"
Logline: When Earth's deadliest forces collide, humanity hangs in the balance.
Premise: A dormant supervolcano awakens, spewing ash into the atmosphere and spawning massive tornadoes worldwide. A team of volcanologists and storm chasers must work together to trigger a controlled eruption that will neutralize the tornadoes before they destroy every major city on the planet.
I hope any of these may catch your interest!
You may reach me via my agent.
“Simply put, Twisters wears its Big Summer Movie heart on its sleeve. The score is rousing and righteous, the star power at times overwhelming to look at directly. (...) Twisters effectively throws every other adrenaline-pumping cinematic tool in its bolted-down wheelhouse at you.” Twisters Review: One of the Most Satisfying Movies of the Summer (Indie Wire)
“We expect that the number of days in any given year that are favourable for tornadoes… are going to increase in the future and specifically increase earlier in the season," Victor Gensini, associate professor of meteorology at Northern Illinois University, tells the BBC. (...) States notorious for tornadoes such as Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas are actually seeing a decrease in tornadoes while states like Tennessee, Georgia and Arkansas as well as upper Midwest states like Minnesota, Illinois and Iowa are seeing an increase "We have way more people living in the mid-south and east of the Mississippi River than we do in the Great Plains," Gensini says.” In a warmer world, tornado behaviour is changing – this is how we can prepare (BBC)
“Anytime Hollywood is doing anything with climate change, I think we have to stay positive and let people have fun,” he says. “As a production, we want to inspire people to embrace the natural world. That can go quite a long ways toward influencing people to make good choices in their relationship with nature, to study what’s happening on this Earth and to figure out how can we become better caretakers of the planet.”'Twisters' Director Lee Isaac Chung Wants Nature to Put Us in Our Place (Hollywood Reporter)
“Yeah, I did see this as a monster movie. And that movie is about three people and three people dealing with this force of nature, this shark. And it was great to be able to work with Steven Spielberg on this film and to talk about "Jaws" and how he increased tension and all those things.”Director Lee Isaac Chung shares the inspirations behind 'Twisters' (NPR)
I miss PSH’s “Dusty” character!