-- Shares Facebook Twitter Reddit Email Hollywood's latest weather disaster blockbuster, "Twisters" (a standalone sequel to the 1996 film "Twister"), features plenty of extreme weather — yet it has a somewhat incongruous scorn for scientists who study the weather. The discordant note is subtle, but at the same time hard to entirely miss. Without spoiling too much of the plot, "Twisters" depicts most of its PhDs and other professional scientists as cynical, selfish, cold and intellectually narrow.
By contrast, the movie's fictional YouTubers and amateur storm chasers are overwhelmingly shown as idealistic, compassionate, colorful and far more knowledgeable about science that those stuffy official scientists. "It’s an unfortunate lost opportunity that speaks to the pusillanimous nature of Hollywood these days." Despite this attitude of smug superiority toward the scientific profession, "Twisters" doesn't once mention climate change, which may seem bizarre for a weather disaster film in 2024.
But that wasn't an accident. As director Lee Isaac Chung told CNN , "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. I think it should be a reflection of the world.
” Given that global heating is one of the greatest existential threats to humanity — a threat responsible for increasingly frequent erratic and intense weather, including cyclones and tornadoes — the question.