The words “climate change” never appear in the new film TwisterThis makes political sense. For a blockbuster made to maximize the broad appeal of computer-generated thrills, a direct climate tie-in might have been a box-office flop. And yet this summer’s reboot of the 1996 (almost) classic thriller of the same name tackles a central dilemma of our disaster-prone times: Storms caused by global warming claim thousands of lives and destroy billions of dollars of property every year, yet we have yet to agree on the right way to direct society’s resources to address this fact. When it comes to climate-induced disasters, should we devote our chips to scientific research, cutting-edge engineering, or simply protecting ourselves from the dangers?
Despite the film’s best efforts to keep the tone light, Twister The film highlights this dilemma in a provocative way. the day after tomorrowThe film is not so much an allegory about the awesome power of nature as it is an allegory about the ethics of climate adaptation, dramatizing how scientists, engineers, and profit-makers respond to the forces of nature. But while the film does deserve credit for addressing the question of whether responses to disasters are fair and effective, in reality, Answer This question is as flat as the plains of Tornado Alley where it is happening.
The film’s protagonist is Kate Carter (Daisy Edgar-Jones), an Oklahoma-born meteorologist with an obsession with tornadoes and a weird, sometimes-sounding Southern accent. Kate has a special talent for predicting the weather, evidenced in the film by her looking to the sky rather than a computer to find out if rain is coming. A bright-eyed graduate student, she dreams of developing a chemical solution to weaken tornadoes before they destroy homes. But (spoiler alert) three of her fellow scientists are killed in Kate’s haphazard attempt to test her idea on a monster storm.
The bulk of the film follows a chastened Kate five years later, working a boring desk job at the National Weather Service in New York. Suddenly, her only remaining companion comes to her asking for help with one last job: Javi (Anthony Ramos) has developed technology to scan tornadoes in high resolution, but only if he can find a way to deploy it just feet away from the spawning tornadoes. Javi lures Kate back to Oklahoma to help his new startup, Storm-Par, track tornadoes to deploy the technology and capture the data. When pitching to Kate, Javi seems to bring up the growing damage of climate change: “It’s getting worse every year, but now we have a way to fight back.”
In fact, in the real world, the situation is getting worse every year. According to reinsurance company Swiss Re, annual property damage from tornadoes and other convective storms has increased by about 8% every year since 2008, shaking up the insurance industry and leading to big premium hikes in states like Oklahoma. Oklahoma residents pay higher average home insurance rates than any other state in the U.S., even higher than hurricane-prone Florida. This trend is driven primarily by claims for damages from tornadoes and hail.
Still, the science linking climate change to tornadoes is less solid than Havi suggests. On the one hand, it’s reasonable to think that rising temperatures will lead to more convective storms that produce tornadoes, because warm air is more unstable and contains more moisture. But tornadoes themselves are so ephemeral that it’s hard to know for sure. There’s also evidence that the geographic extent of “Tornado Alley” is shifting from the heart of Oklahoma, where the film is set, to states like Alabama further south and east. And the insurance industry argues that it’s mainly rising population density and rising building material prices that are causing the insurance crisis, not climate change.
Why tornadoes are a disaster that is hard to link to climate change
Either way, Javi is right that something has to give up, and Kate answers the call. Arriving in Oklahoma during a massive tornado, the pair face off against popular YouTuber Tyler Owens (Glen Powell), who has garnered millions of fans by driving a modified Dodge Ram into the center of a tornado (this gas-guzzling product placement may be the most environmentally unfriendly part of the movie). Tyler is immediately romantically attracted to Kate, and within five minutes he shows up everywhere she goes, grinning at her. It seems like a setup that works well enough: the cute but nerdy scientist chases storms for science and public good, while the influencer chases for clout and self-interest, but there’s still an attraction between the two.
The story isn’t that simple, though. Storm Par’s main investor turns out to be real estate developer Marshall Riggs. Riggs knows that many Oklahomans are uninsured and can’t afford to rebuild their homes after the tornadoes, so he wants to buy them out for cash and develop new subdivisions. Javi started his company to collect data to protect people from tornadoes, but now he’s following the orders of someone who wants to “profit off people’s tragedies,” as one character puts it, somewhat clumsily. (Why Riggs needs advanced weather data to make a cash offer on a destroyed home is unclear, and probably wasn’t even clear to the writers.)
Here again, the film gets it right in the abstract. It’s common for real estate speculators to flock to areas hit by devastating disasters, like Maui after last year’s Lahaina fires, and make aggressive cash offers on homes. Many victims of fires, floods, and tornadoes don’t have the insurance to fully rebuild their homes, making these low offers incredibly hard to turn down, especially for those on low incomes. In 2017’s Hurricane Harvey, for example, Hedge funds such as Cerberus Capital Management They bought hundreds of flooded homes at discount prices and resold them as rentals, easily recouping their initial investment.
As Kat discovers the more sinister side of Javi’s business, she also discovers that hotshot storm chaser Tyler is more complicated than he seems. At first, Kat ignores his shenanigans (he sets off fireworks in tornadoes and sells T-shirts with his face on them), but her heart softens when she sees him and his team handing out free food and supplies to tornado victims. Of all the people who have gathered to chase tornadoes, Tyler and his crew are the only ones who actually chase tornadoes. helpEven well-intentioned scientist Kate realizes she’s not actually doing much good — after all, she killed her original team because she was too hungry for academic grants, Javi hints in one tense exchange — if we’re not pouring resources into the people who live in the shadow of these storms, then what’s the point?
The plot twist may be clumsy, but it, too, illustrates a real-world ethical dilemma: Journalists use readers’ money to uncover the stories of disaster victims, and scientists get funding from governments and universities to study these storms. But wouldn’t it be better to give that money to the victims? As if to underscore the point, disaster response agency FEMA is conspicuously absent from the depiction of Oklahoma. Perhaps in the film, the agency’s main disaster relief fund has run out of money; in fact it was close to running out of money last year, and Maybe I’ll do that this year.
This dilemma raises a further question: if money is best spent to alleviate suffering, wouldn’t it be better to reduce vulnerability to disasters in the first place, rather than cleaning up after them? Twister pursues this question to some extent, but opts for the easy answer, taking refuge in the illusion that humans can design their way out of disaster without changing the way we build, consume and live.
After learning the truth about Stormpar’s business model, Kate has a moral decision-making moment that comes during a predictably tearful nighttime drive accompanied by a Rainie Wilson ballad. Desperate to help storm victims, she resurrects an old idea for a chemical solution that can slow down tornadoes, perfecting the concept with the latest data. Interestingly, the new film updates the original in its embrace of this bold techno-optimism. TwisterIn “The Force Awakens,” an intrepid scientist played by Helen Hunt tries to design a data-gathering tool to predict tornadoes rather than destroy them. In the 30 years between the original and the reboot, in other words, we’ve progressed from measuring nature to controlling it, and the realization has become clear that today’s storms are too dangerous to be left unchecked.
It’s worth pausing for a moment to consider just how useful Kate’s device actually is. Sure, it could shatter a tornado, but to do that, you’d have to stick the device inside it. And the problem with tornadoes is that they can occur just about anywhere in a matter of minutes. If millions of homes, stores, and schools are at risk of destruction from such a disaster, as they are, is a miracle device really the best solution? Probably not, any more than cloud seeding is the best solution to a millennium drought, or a multi-billion dollar system of interlocking floodgates is the best solution to rising sea levels.
It’s clear that at least some involved in the film’s production intended Kate’s adventure as an allegory for climate adaptation in general. Implicit references to climate change are throughout: an early tornado sets off and then topples wind turbines; a climactic tornado rips through an oil refinery and slams a pump jack into a water tower, which collapses and nearly crushes Glen Powell’s already oddly shaped head. Kate’s mother, a farmer, remarks that there seem to be “more tornadoes, floods and droughts” and laments climate-related inflation that causes fluctuations in commodity prices for wheat.
Similarly, Kate’s chemical solution can be seen as a proxy for human ingenuity in confronting climate disaster. But as with the other disasters mentioned by Kate’s mother, the big problem with tornadoes isn’t that there’s no way to make them disappear, but rather the fact that Javi identifies with the idyllic residents of New Reno, cowering in the town’s posh movie theater as the tornado approaches in the film’s climax.
“This theater wasn’t built to withstand what’s going to happen!” Javi yelled, pushing townspeople away from the collapsing walls.
surely.
