Twisters doesn’t mention climate change to avoid feeling preachy

It would have made sense if Twisters — a film about storm chasers studying a spate of unusually powerful and destructive tornadoes — worked climate change into its story. But in a recent interview with CNN, director Lee Isaac Chung said that, even though he thinks cinema “should be a reflection of the world,” he avoided mentioning climate change in Twisters because he doesn’t “feel like films are meant to be message-oriented.”

Chung pointed to the way that some of Twisters’ characters talk about the weather as one of the ways the film comments on “the reality of what’s happening on the ground” and insisted his intention was not to “shy away from saying that things are changing.” But when you consider how scientists have found that the conditions that create tornado-producing storms are more likely in a warming world, Twisters’ avoidance of the phrase “climate change” feels like shying away and then some.

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.