Twisters is set be to in theaters this Friday and during a recent interview with CNN, the movie’s director, Lee Isaac Chung, said his movie will not mention climate change. Chung told the network:

“I just wanted to make sure that with the movie, we don’t ever feel like it is putting forward any message. I just don’t feel like films are meant to be message-oriented. … I think what we are doing is showing the reality of what’s happening on the ground … we don’t shy away from saying that things are changing. 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.”

Not surprisingly, the news media is fit to be tied. Upon Chung revealing Twisters‘ script will be a vehicle for their political agenda, the knives came out.

CNN initially gives Chung credit saying:

To his credit, there is some scientific justification for the omission, too. Generally, scientists are the least certain about the connection between tornadoes and climate change as it’s unclear how warming temperatures are changing storms themselves or the outbreaks.

Then CNN still berates Chung saying:

However, evidence is growing of the potential impact of planet-warming pollution. Recent studies have showed rotating, supercell thunderstorms that produce tornadoes are becoming more frequent in parts of the US outside so-called Tornado Alley, including in the Southeast and Midwest. They are also becoming more frequent in seasons that aren’t the traditional severe storm season, and recent December outbreaks have proved particularly deadly.

“We’ve never seen tornadoes like this before,” says Javi, Anthony Ramos’ entrepreneurial storm chaser, in one scene. He goes on to convince old friend Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones) to join his research team, promising “We can save lives.”

The Hollywood Reporter was nothing short of surprised:

The possible impact of climate change on tornadoes is complicated and still being figured out, but scientists seem to agree tornado patterns are changing (with more tornadoes happening on the same days and more tornadoes happening outside of Tornado Alley, even if the number of tornadoes overall is unchanged). And, in any case, the American Red Cross recent told ABC News that “the climate crisis is forcing the American Red Cross to respond to nearly twice as many large disasters as we did a decade ago.”

So if you’re making a 2024 movie about a tornado outbreak the likes of which have never been seen before, there’s a rather convenient raison d’etre sitting right there. Simply have Daisy Edgar-Jones frantically look at some Doppler radar and mutter an actual study statistic like: “The Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society projected a 6.6 percent nationwide increase in the frequency of supercell thunderstorms by the end of the century because of global warming — but nothing like this!” and suddenly your summer tornado popcorn movie has a bit of “but seriously tho, this could really happen” semi-scientific heft.

But to hear director Lee Isaac Chung tell it, even such a throwaway reference would be like beating red state moviegoers over the head with a DVD copy of An Inconvenient Truth.

From The Verge:

As a weather disaster sequel whose premise boils down to “what if tornadoes, but bigger and sometimes on fire,” Twisters seems like it would have been well positioned to explore the realities of how researchers are still trying to understand the relationship between climate change and the kinds of storms that cause catastrophic destruction. Factors like limited data collection methods still make it difficult for researchers to establish concrete connections between climate change and the growing intensity of extreme weather events.

But those are exactly the kinds of ideas that can make movies like Twisters interesting and feel like thoughtful evolutions of a franchise, one that began as a story about storm chasers using technology to better understand tornadoes. And with Twisters dropping at such a meteorologically wild time, the movie’s refusal to mention climate change is probably going to make it seem even sillier than it already does when it premieres on July 19th.

Even the original Twister that was released in the 1990’s didn’t go into climate change (then known as global warming) and Chung is a huge fan of that movie.

Chung’s only crime is recognizing that the role of movies is to entertain and not preach. He’s absolutely right and there was a time in this country that people like Lee Isaac Chung understood that. Hopefully this is the start of a new trend of movie production companies avoiding political messaging. Unlikely, but one can always hope.

PHOTO CREDIT: A tornado near Anadarko, Oklahoma, 1999 – By Daphne Zaras – http://www.nssl.noaa.gov/headlines/dszpics.htmlOriginally uploaded at en.wikipedia; description page is/was here., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2130165