Opinion | How ‘Twisters’ Failed Us and Our Burning Planet

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.”