Twisters Offers an Unlikely Solution to One of the Greatest Problems of Our Time
When the storm chasers in the original Twister happen upon an unprecedented weather event, they can’t believe their luck. Helen Hunt’s meteorologist is practically giddy with excitement when she informs her colleagues that “it’s the biggest series of storms in 12 years, one lined up right after the other,” adding that the National Severe Storms Laboratory has “never seen anything like it.” But by the time Twisters picks up the story nearly 30 years later, extreme weather is no longer such an extraordinary occurrence. At least in Tornado Alley, the vertical strip in the Central U.S. where the movies take place, dramatic and destructive storms are regular enough that you can build a business plan around them, whether you’re a land baron buying up properties at fire-sale prices or a social-media star like Glen Powell’s Tyler Owens, who steers his specially modified pickup truck into harm’s way and flashes a gleaming grin to the camera amid the chaos. For Tyler and his band of thrill-seeking misfits, who call themselves the Tornado Wranglers, it’s not enough to just catch up with the storms. They have to master them.
For an unabashedly overblown (in every sense) blockbuster, the original Twister has surprisingly modest stakes. After watching her father get sucked up by a tornado when she was a child, Hunt’s Jo Harding has dedicated her life to research that, if successful, would increase the warning time before storms strike from three to 15 minutes—enough time for more people to get to safety, sure, but hardly enough to do anything about the rest of the destruction those storms typically wreak. (According to one estimate, a four-day tornado outbreak in April caused more than $2 billion in property damage.) The logic of sequels requires that Twisters raise the stakes, and so Daisy Edgar-Jones’ meteorologist Kate Cooper—who, like Hunt’s character, is driven by the tornado-related loss of loved ones, and similarly spends the bulk of the movie in a white tank top—isn’t out just to give people an even longer head start. She’s out to, in her words, “tame” tornadoes, using hyperabsorbent materials to starve them of the moisture on which they feed.
Despite three decades of technological leaps, deploying Kate’s hoped-for solution still involves driving trucks through wheat fields at high rates of speed and hoping that the storm gets close enough to suck up their payload—barrels full of, in this case, sodium polyacrylate, the same substance that, as one character points out early on, is used in diapers. Back in 2005, diaper gel magnate Peter Cordani proposed a much grander plan, using a fleet of 747s to dump the material into hurricanes, and scientists and entrepreneurs have proposed grander methods still, plans they hope could mitigate and even reverse the effects of climate change itself, like altering the composition of clouds so they reflect greater amounts of sunlight. Because as a long-term rise in global temperature has gone from a possibility to a virtual certainty, something else has also become clear: Warnings, no matter how stern or severe, simply aren’t enough.
But focusing on larger solutions would require admitting larger problems, something Twisters director Lee Isaac Chung (Minari) has been reluctant to do. A few weeks ago, Chung made an appearance at the Hollywood Climate Summit, along with real-life scientists who testified to the movie’s accuracy. “Climate change is a very real thing that we’re all dealing with, and we’re seeing the effects of that,” said the film’s “tornado consultant” Sean Waugh, and characters in the film talk frequently about how much worse things have been of late. Because tornadoes are extremely localized phenomena, scientists have had difficulty pinpointing exactly how rising global temperatures affect them, but the storms have behaved differently in recent years, appearing more frequently in clusters, and some theorize that we will see more and more destructive thunderstorms as temperatures continue to rise.
Chung, who was raised in rural Arkansas, is attuned to what he calls “the reality of what’s happening on the ground.” Unlike the first movie, Twisters reflects an awareness that the sight of homes being shredded by churning winds is not merely a spectacle to be offered up for easy consumption. But Chung also deliberately avoids any mention of what might be contributing to that reality. Preaching messages, he told CNN, is “not what I think cinema should be about.” So no one in Twisters talks about why things might be getting worse. They just are, and we all have to deal with it.
Or … maybe we don’t? Instead of a message about climate change, Chung’s movie puts forth a different idea: Don’t sweat it. Science has got this. There’s little evidence that the diaper-gel solution could actually stop tornadoes, and decades of other proposals, including one that involves using satellites to bombard the atmosphere with microwaves, haven’t borne fruit either. But in Twisters, it just takes combining new discoveries with old ones—Kate’s particles and the chemicals that have been used for so-called cloud seeding since the mid-1940s—along with a combination of intuition and sheer bravado. All you have to do is believe.
These geoengineering solutions are especially attractive because they don’t require any change. We can keep consuming to our heart’s desire, secure in the knowledge that some smart person, now or in the future, will figure out a way to fill the hole faster than we’re digging it. The trouble is that when their powers aren’t enhanced by the magic of Hollywood screenwriting, these solutions remain largely theoretical, and the unforeseen negative consequences of altering the planet’s chemistry could be severe. That’s not counting the fact that most geoengineering proposals factor in worldwide cutbacks in carbon emissions equal or greater to the ones laid out in the Paris Agreement in 2015. Geoengineering, a study concluded last year, is not a quick fix for climate catastrophe but one that could require as long as a century to make a lasting difference. During Twisters’ climax, the characters take shelter in a small-town movie theater, but the building isn’t strong enough to withstand the raging storm outside; the walls are torn away, and bodies fly out through the hole where the screen used to be. The problem is quite literally more than a movie can contain.
