In 'Twisters,' there are no winds of (climate) change

The summer blockbuster is back, and like so much of our recent mainstream media intake, what's old is new again. Enter "Twisters," the loose sequel-cum-spiritual-successor to 1996's mega-hit "Twister." As its pluralizing "s" indicates, "Twisters" understands that its main proposition to viewers is: more. More action, more special effects wizardry and, yes, more of the eponymous whirlwinds wreaking havoc across more combustible set pieces.  

But for a movie premised on cinematic excess, there's an absence in "Twisters" as well. Despite its focus on catastrophic weather, the film carefully elides any mention of climate change and its real-world contributions to the meteorological bedlam described onscreen. That, it turns out, is by design. "I just wanted to make sure that with the movie, we don't ever feel like (it) is putting forward any message," the director Lee Isaac Chung said at CNN. "I just don’t feel like films are meant to be message-oriented." 

"I wanted to make sure that we are never creating a feeling that we're preaching a message, because that's certainly not what I think cinema should be about," Chung added. "I think it should be a reflection of the world."

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Chung's omission in service of a pure cinematic experience has nevertheless raised eyebrows — and questions — from critics and viewers who are wondering how a film about extreme weather works without addressing an underlying factor. Others, meanwhile, have celebrated the movie's embrace of straightforward storytelling over broader moralizing. 

'Safe and sanitized'

Rather than focus on climate change, "Twisters" "proposes a "different idea: Don't sweat it. Science has got this," said Slate. The "geoengineering solutions" designed to combat catastrophic tornadoes in the film are "especially attractive because they don't require any change" despite those solutions being "largely theoretical." In that, "Twisters" offers viewers a "safe and sanitized way to experience a natural disaster: as a fantasy," The New York Times said. That the film "doesn't even pay lip service to climate change is "no surprise" in so much as "climate change isn't sexy or exciting enough for Hollywood entertainment" beyond a few outlying exceptions. 

Chung is far from the "first high-profile filmmaker" to "purposefully leave mentions of climate change out of his film," Forbes said. Christopher Nolan's "Interstellar" also eschews addressing the topic, despite being set in a "not-too-distant future" in which the Earth is "dying amid conditions akin to the Dust Bowl era in the Southern Plains region of America in the 1930s."

And while climate change itself may not be mentioned onscreen, "Twisters" is "much more accurate" scientifically than its predecessor, former National Severe Storms Laboratory meteorologist Sean Waugh, who consulted on both films, said at Nature. "If they could change things and make it a bit more scientifically correct, they did."

'A rather convenient raison d’être'

"Twisters" seems like it would have been "well positioned to explore the realities" of the complicated — and still very much opaque — "relationship between climate change and tornadoes," The Verge said. By pointedly not addressing "factors like limited data collection methods" which "still make it difficult for researchers to establish concrete connections" between climate change and tornadoes, "Twisters" misses an opportunity to be a "thoughtful [evolution] of a franchise." Instead it makes the whole project "seem even sillier than it already does."

Climate change offers a "rather convenient raison d’être" for why the film's titular twisters are larger and more frequent this time around, The Hollywood Reporter said. Mention it, and "suddenly your summer tornado popcorn movie has a bit of 'but seriously tho, this could really happen' semi-scientific heft." To not mention it at all, then, is a "reflection of studio caution during polarized times when looking for a summer movie hit."

By depicting a climate change-less world in which the "only solution [is] a bunch of technobabble," the film essentially presents a false and harmful "shortcut to doing the hard work to slow climate change, an Ozempic for the Earth," MSNBC said. It's a form of "magical thinking" which has "infected how we approach climate change in the real world, too."

"It's not 'preaching' to acknowledge the world we all live in," said climate journalist Anna Jane Joyner on X. "Ignoring it sends a clear message too."