The words “climate change” do not appear at all in the new film Twisters. It makes political sense: For a blockbuster designed to maximize the broad appeal of its computer-generated thrills, a direct climate tie-in might have been box office poison. Nevertheless, this summer’s reboot of the classic 1996 thriller of (almost) the same name tackles a central dilemma of our disaster-prone era. Storms fueled by global warming claim thousands of lives and destroy billions of dollars in property each year, but we can’t quite agree on the right way to direct society’s resources to respond to this fact. When it comes to climate-driven disasters, should we put our chips on scientific research, modern engineering, or just to move ourselves out of the way?
Despite the film’s own best efforts to keep things light, Twisters succeeds in elevating this dilemma in a somewhat provocative way. The film is not an ordinary, Day after tomorrow-style fable about the awesome power of nature, but instead a parable about the ethics of climate adaptation, one that dramatizes the ways in which scientists, engineers, and profiteers respond to nature’s power. But while the film deserves some credit for asking the question of what a fair and effective disaster response would look like, what it actually answers this question is about as flat as the Tornado Alley plains in which it takes place.
The protagonist of the film is Kate Carter (Daisy Edgar-Jones), an Oklahoma-born meteorologist with a tornado obsession and a curiously alternating Southern accent. Kate has a special gift for predicting the weather, which is demonstrated in the film by the fact that she looks at the sky rather than a computer to find out if it’s going to rain. As a bright-eyed graduate student, she dreams of developing a chemical solution that can weaken tornadoes before they destroy homes. But—and the spoilers begin here—Kate’s rash attempt to test the idea on a monster storm kills three of her fellow scientists.
The bulk of the film takes place five years later when Kate, chastened, works a boring desk job at the National Weather Service in New York. Out of the blue, her only surviving comrade approaches to ask for help with one last job. Javi (Anthony Ramos) has developed a technology that provides high-resolution scans of tornado dynamics—but only if he can find a way to deploy it just a few feet from an emerging tornado. Javi lures Kate back to Oklahoma to help his new startup, Storm Par, track tornadoes so it can deploy the technology and grab the data. Speaking to Kate, Javi seems to evoke the increasing toll of climate change: “It’s getting worse every year, but now we have a way to fight back.”
Indeed, it also gets worse every year in the real world. Annual property losses from tornadoes and other convective storms have risen about 8 percent each year since 2008, according to reinsurance company Swiss Re, the insurance industry is buzzing and lead to large premium price increases in states like Oklahoma. Residents of the Sooner State pay the highest average homeowner’s insurance premium of any state in the United States—even higher than hurricane-prone Florida – a trend driven primarily by tornado and hail claims.
Still, the science linking climate change and tornadoes is somewhat less certain than Javi implies. On the one hand, warmer air is less stable and holds more moisture, so there is reason to believe that a warmer world will have more of the convective storms that cause tornadoes. However, the twisters themselves are so fleeting and short-lived that it’s hard to know for sure. There is also some evidence that the geographic scope of “Tornado Alley” has shifted south and east into states like Alabama, away from the Oklahoma heartland where the film is set. And insurers argue that it is mostly increasing population density and inflation in building material costs that are driving the insurance crisis, rather than climate change.
Either way, Javi is right that something has to give, and Kate is heeding the call. When they arrive in Oklahoma during an epic tornado outbreak, they find themselves facing competition from Tyler Owens (Glen Powell), a hotshot YouTuber who has garnered millions of fans by driving a souped-up Dodge Ram straight into the heart of tornadoes . (This gas-guzzling product placement may be the least climate-friendly part of the film.) Tyler soon develops a romantic interest in Kate, which he demonstrates by showing up five minutes later wherever she goes and smiling at her. It seems like a serviceable enough setup: A cute-but-nerdy scientist chases storms for the sake of science and public good, while an influencer chases them for influence and personal gain—but there’s a magnetism between them nonetheless.
Except it’s not that simple. It turns out that Storm Par’s main investor is a real estate developer named Marshall Riggs. Riggs knows that many Oklahomans are underinsured and can’t afford to rebuild after tornadoes, and he wants to scoop up their homes with cash offers so he can develop new subdivisions. Javi started the company to collect data that could protect people from tornadoes, but now he’s doing the bidding of someone who wants to, as one character puts it perhaps a little clumsily, “profit from people’s tragedy.” (Why Riggs needs advanced meteorological data to make cash offers on ruined homes is unclear, and may never have been clear to the screenwriters.)
Here, too, the film gets something right in the abstract. It’s really common for real estate speculators to descend on areas that have experienced a devastating disaster, like Maui after last year’s Lāhainā fire, and makes aggressive all-cash offers for homes. Many fire, flood and tornado victims don’t have the kind of insurance coverage that can pay for a complete rebuild of their properties, making these low-ball offers very difficult to turn down, especially for those with ‘ a modest income. In the wake of Hurricane Harvey in 2017, for example, hedge funds such as Cerberus Capital Management bought hundreds of flooded homes at a discount and converted them into rental homes, easily recouping their initial investments.
As Kat discovers the more seedy side of Javi’s business venture, she simultaneously discovers that fiery storm chaser Tyler is also more complicated than he seems. Kate initially rejects his antics (he shoots off fireworks into tornadoes and sells t-shirts with his face on them), but she softens once she sees him and his team handing out free food and supplies to tornado victims. Out of all the people who have gathered to chase tornadoes, Tyler and his gang are the only ones who actually do help. Even Kate, the better scientist, thinks she didn’t actually do much good – after all, she killed her original team because she was too thirsty for an academic grant, or so Javi implies during one tense exchange. If you don’t send resources to those living in the shadow of these storms, what’s the point?
However this plot twist is, it also follows a real ethical dilemma. Journalists spend their readers’ money to cover the stories of disaster victims, and scientists take money from governments and universities to study these storms – but wouldn’t it be better to just give that money to the victims? As if to drive the point home, the disaster response agency FEMA is conspicuously absent from the film’s depiction of Oklahoma: Perhaps the agency’s primary disaster relief fund ran out of money in the film, as it did in reality almost done last year and can do well this year.
This dilemma raises a further question: If money is best spent reducing suffering, wouldn’t it be better to reduce vulnerability to disasters in the first place rather than just cleaning up after they hit? Twisters pursues this question to a point, but it opts for an easy answer, resorting to a fantasy that people can engineer their way out of disasters without changing anything about the way they build, consume and live.
After learning the truth about Storm Par’s business model, Kate has a moment of moral reckoning, predictably represented by a tearful night drive with a Lainey Wilson ballad playing in the background. Desperate to help storm victims, she revives her old idea of a chemical solution that can slow tornadoes, using newfangled data to perfect the concept. Interestingly, the new film’s endorsement of this brutal techno-optimism is an update of the original Twister, in which Helen Hunt’s intrepid scientist tries to design an instrument that can gather data to predict tornadoes, rather than destroy them. In the 30 years between the original movie and its reboot, in other words, we’ve graduated from measuring nature to controlling it, an apparent acknowledgment that today’s storms are too dangerous to leave untouched.
It’s worth pausing for a moment to evaluate just how useful Kate’s contraption would actually be. It can disintegrate tornadoes, sure, but you have to drive it into a tornado to do that, and the whole problem with tornadoes is that they can appear almost anywhere in a matter of minutes. If millions of homes, shops and schools are vulnerable to destruction from these disasters, as they really are, is a miracle gizmo really the best solution? Probably no more than cloud seeding is the best solution to a millennium-scale drought, or a multibillion-dollar system of interlocking floodgates is the best solution to sea-level rise.
It’s clear that at least a few people involved in the making of the film intended Kate’s quest to serve as an allegory for climate adaptation in general. Coded references to climate change are everywhere: An early tornado kicks some wind turbines into motion, then knocks them over. The climate spinner rolls through an oil refinery and sends a pumping force into the water tower, which collapses and nearly crushes Glen Powell’s already oddly shaped head. Kate’s mother, a farmer, notes that there seem to be “more tornadoes, and floods and droughts,” and laments the climate-related inflation causing swings in the price of commodity wheat.
At the same time, Kate’s chemical solution can be seen as an aid to human ingenuity intended to cope with climate disasters. But the big problem with tornadoes, as with the other disasters listed by Kate’s mother, is not that we don’t have tools to blow them into oblivion. Rather, it’s the fact that Javi identifies as he and the residents of the idyllic town of New Reno cower in the town’s elegant movie theater as the film’s climactic twist approaches.
“This theater was not built to withstand what’s coming!” Javi shouted, pushing the townspeople away from a collapsing wall.
Indeed.
