https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/twisters-climate-change-1235949639
‘Twisters’ Director on Not Mentioning Climate Change: Movies Shouldn’t “Preach a Message”
Director Lee Isaac Chung on why his meteorological disaster movie doesn’t reference global warming.
Excerpt: So if you’re making a 2024 movie about a tornado outbreak the likes of which have never been seen before, there’s a rather convenient raison d’etre sitting right there. Simply have Daisy Edgar-Jones frantically look at some Doppler radar and mutter an actual study statistic like: “The Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society projected a 6.6 percent nationwide increase in the frequency of supercell thunderstorms by the end of the century because of global warming — but nothing like this!” and suddenly your summer tornado popcorn movie has a bit of “but seriously tho, this could really happen” semi-scientific heft.
But to hear director Lee Isaac Chung tell it, even such a throwaway reference would be like beating red state moviegoers over the head with a DVD copy of An Inconvenient Truth.
“I just wanted to make sure that with the movie, we don’t ever feel like it is putting forward any message,” Chung told CNN. “I just don’t feel like films are meant to be message-oriented.”
There is a scene where a local farmer played by Maura Tierney says that storms and floods are becoming more frequent, but she doesn’t mention climate change.
“I think what we are doing is showing the reality of what’s happening on the ground … we don’t shy away from saying that things are changing,” Chung added. “I wanted to make sure that we are never creating a feeling that we’re preaching a message, because that’s certainly not what I think cinema should be about. I think it should be a reflection of the world.”
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Propaganda is propaganda even if it doesn’t mention that which shall not be named.
I’m not going pay money to see it.
So I guess you never watch Hollywood movies anyways?
I’d much rather a decent film, like say, an Almodovar or a Bergman, even a Hitchcock and a Lean.
Hollywood, or rather Follywood is stuck in the Marvel/Disney Universe. And it’s losing lots of money.
“”Thanks to a series of seismic flops and misfires, 2023 will be remembered as a definitive year for the box office.””
https://www.looper.com/1473826/2023-box-office-flops-change-hollywood-forever/
Bergman, my favorite director!
The early career of Almodovar is a favourite of mine.
Que he hecho yo para merecer esto! (What have I done to deserve this!) 1984
So, climate change is devastating for Holly movie production.
/s
Hollywood now gives you the choice of watching people play cartoon characters or cartoon characters playing cartoon characters.
That “now” word is the qualifying one. I have watched many a good, entertaining movie in years past.
The director said it is not a message movie, and there was no preaching on climate change. How does this qualify as “propaganda”?
I think he’s referring to the scene where someone says “storms and floods are becoming more frequent,” which of course they are not.
IOW, even without the specific mention of “climate change,” some ass had to get their little dig in there.
In a specific location over a short time span, it could be true. There are cycles. And at that location over a short course of time, it is quite possible that storms and floods were becoming more frequent. At the same location at a different time it would also be possible that storms and floods were becoming less frequent.
The fact is, that particular statement was not expressed as a global phenomenon and therefore is not climate change propaganda.
Yes, The Perfect Storm navigated the story of a humungous storm without mentioning global warming or climate change.
I think he is saying when a movie deviates from entertainment to propaganda, he would not spend money to see it.
The BBC was bigging this movie up recently on its early evening ‘magazine’ show. Nevermind CO2, there isn’t much CGI cannot do.
But I was interested in some of the criticisms of this bit of computer generated celluloid. There was the usual fayre from some extreme parts of the femin-azi spectrum objecting to the portrayal of ‘wimmin’, but the animal rights protests caught my eye, as did some confusion over the film’s message (if you choose to try to take one).
“”To protest the inclusion of rodeo scenes, PETA disrupted the Los Angeles premiere and held signs that read: ‘Stop Glamorizing Rodeos’ and ‘Lasso Tornadoes, Not Animals.’
…
‘We stirred up at a storm at the #TwistersMovie premiere tonight with a clear message against its rodeo scene. Shame on Universal Pictures for glamorizing violence towards animals!’ “”
…
PETA explained they will be content with Universal Studios adding a disclaimer highlighting that rodeos are ‘violent spectacles’ and ‘nothing like what is shown in Twisters.’””
https://metro.co.uk/2024/07/12/twisters-premiere-chaos-protesters-slam-star-studded-new-sequel-film-21214808/
Bonkers as ever. From Nature we have this, which claims insertion of the narrative into the storyline:
“”Nature talks to tornado specialists and scientific advisers for the new disaster film about how it stacks up.
A focus on climate change
One area of science that researchers are glad to see included in the film is how global warming could be affecting tornadoes. “”
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02276-x
Which doesn’t exactly tally with the director’s view:
“””I just wanted to make sure that with the movie, we don’t ever feel like it is putting forward any message,” Chung told CNN. “I just don’t feel like films are meant to be message-oriented.”””
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/movies/news/why-twisters-refuses-to-mention-climate-change/ar-BB1q5qze
He’s dead right. Films conveying a preferred message are propaganda, not entertainment.
Nature magazine’s descent has not been arrested – yet.
‘Shame on Universal Pictures for glamorizing violence towards animals!’. I don’t know but it seems to me that bull riding is more like violence towards cowboys.
funny!
Likewise, bareback and saddle bronc riding.
If PETA were actually to get their way do you think they’d help with the slaughter and disposal of the millions of unwanted animals?
I very much doubt it. That’s for the working classes.
So by your standards, any entertainment film that features any kind of natural disaster, no matter how common and how unrelated to silly claims by the warmunists, is therefore global warming propaganda. Hurricanes, tornadoes, rainfall, sandstorms, floods, forest fires, earthquakes … all are “propaganda”.
So Strativarius now decrees that weather is a forbidden subject for all time.
Sheesh! Talk about extremism. Warmunism is bullshit, but the real world does actually exist, and weather phenomena have always been part of the real world … that is one of the bedrock tenets of anti-warmunism or climate skepticism.
“”So Strativarius now decrees that weather is a forbidden subject for all time.””
Did I? Can you show me where?
Did you even read what I posted?
Do you know what the word “implicit” means?
Yes, but I’m not a spinner. Are you?
Sure. But we can’t read your mind to know what you think is implicit, now can we?
Hans,
One of us read the comment to fast, or just have a comprehension problem, or were just expecting something that wasn’t there.
It may have been me, so I read it again; so, I narrowed it down to either me having a comprehension problem, or you still meeting one of the 3 possibilities in my first paragraph. I need your help in going further.
From the article: ““I just wanted to make sure that with the movie, we don’t ever feel like it is putting forward any message,” Chung told CNN. “I just don’t feel like films are meant to be message-oriented.”
There is a scene where a local farmer played by Maura Tierney says that storms and floods are becoming more frequent, but she doesn’t mention climate change.
“I think what we are doing is showing the reality of what’s happening on the ground … we don’t shy away from saying that things are changing,” Chung added.”
I’m glad they don’t make Human-caused Clmate Change out to be the villain in the movie. I guess I’ll go ahead and watch it now.
But, they *should* shy away from saying things are changing with regard to tornados or the Earth’s climate, because there is no evidence that tornados are changing their behavior.
I live in Tornado Alley. I keep up with these things. Assuming things are changing with the weather is wrongheaded and not backed up by the facts.
Anything coming out of Follywood usually has a message embedded in it somewhere, even if it’s just a scene about pronouns.
And it’s infectious, one of the first casualties….
” The new era of Doctor Who under the BBC and Disney’s agreement will continue to be seen in season 14, led by Ncuti Gatwa’s Fifteenth Doctor and Millie Gibson’s Ruby Sunday.”
…
If Disney collapsed tomorrow and we had to go back to making Doctor Who on a normal BBC budget, you know what? We’d all rally round and make it and suddenly the stories would become claustrophobic ghost stories.
https://screenrant.com/doctor-who-season-14-bbc-disney-deal-explained-russell-t-davies/
The magic stardust effect:
“”BBC Doctor Who branded ‘woke’ and ‘unwatchable’ as TV ratings plummet following return to screens””
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/entertainment/tv/bbc-doctor-who-branded-woke-and-unwatchable-as-tv-ratings-plummet-following-return-to-screens/ar-BB1mjcoM
Doctor Who used to be fun precisely because it didn’t take itself serious with expensive special effects and important plot lines. Cybermen, Daleks, the Master — just fun stuff.
Then they went and hired that Nathan idiot. I remember an interview where he said one of the things he was proudest of was making Tom Baker wear makeup. I gave up when Peter Davison was the Doctor with that idiotic stick of celery in his pocket; affectation for the sake of affectation. Anyone who thinks a stupid stick of celery is equivalent to a long scarf is too dumb for me. Davison was perfect in All Creatures Great And Small, but the Doctor?
/rant
Floods could be more frequent without climate change, if other man-caused factors are involved. Development tends to magnify flooding, as can agriculture if proper soil conservation measures are not practiced. As can clear cut logging. Flooding is not one-dimensional, caused only by more frequent rains. As evidenced, for instance, by destructive flash floods that occur periodically in dry desert areas, and some years they are more common than other years. The deserts don’t get much rain, but when it does rain, the nearly bare ground surfaces of a typical desert cause rainfall to run off rapidly and collect in arroyos and dry stream beds.
Could, if, but might….
You’re doing well, kid.
“Floods could be more frequent without climate change”
I would not disagree with that.
But, there’s no evidence of more frequent floods at this time.
The western deserts have hundreds of gulches: dry stream beds formed by flash floods that may go years without getting enough rain to fill up again. The Platte River in Nebraska is a picture perfect example of a “braided river” formed by intense but brief floods that carve out a wide riverbed with steep banks. When the floods subside, the water flow recedes to shallow, widely spaced channels that use only a small fraction of the river bed’s overall capacity. The Platte has almond-shaped islands with forests on them, farms, even small settlements.
There are dozens of braided rivers like the Platte all over the world. The Indus River that runs the length of Pakistan is another, periodically flooded, braided river that’s the seat of one of the oldest agriculture-based civilizations in world history. Nearly 200 million people now live in or near the Indus River Valley, and depend on its food production. Rainfall patterns have always been highly seasonal, but erratic, and are likely to remain so.
The Grand Canyon in Arizona was formed over millions of years by recurring but sporadic, “catastrophic” floods that have eroded the Colorado River’s banks a mile deep into the plateaus of Northern Arizona.
The trouble with climate alarmists is that they don’t look at weather or climate with a long enough time frame. Nobody knows how often or severe “destructive flash floods” are, or any other kind of dramatic weather occurrence. We don’t have sufficient long-term data, nor a clear understanding of causes and effects. Most important, we don’t know how to stop change, or even why we should try.
When people say they DO know, and claim to know how to re-engineer climate for the betterment of “the planet,” they are either kidding themselves, kidding you, or both.
Is the erosion shown below a catastrophe or a miracle of nature? Whatever it is, it took a long time to sculpt.
It’s funny, innit, how people think fictional characters, in this case, a farmer, are experts on complex topics such as the weather.
In film, wise local folks are always smarter and more knowledgeable than the experts. Especially government experts.
Have there ever been any monster, horror, or whatever type of movie you prefer to label them, that doesn’t state or imply that things are not like your real life experience says they are? The same can be asked about most adventure, intrigue, political, romance, and many other types of movies.
Two things: First trying to remake the excellent film “Twister” is a no vote on my part as to watching it.
And kudos to the Director for adhering to Louis B Mayer’s famous quote on film making: ” If you want to send a message, write a telegram”… (i.e. don’t try to do it in films)
Remakes, reboots, resets…
They’re really all out of ideas. Thank Gaia for CGI.
It’s been the era of ascended fanfiction in the film industry for a good fifteen years if not longer. I remember when Man of Steel came out and it was essentially a bad Supes fanfic with a Hollywood budget.
The first Ben Hur movie was in the 30s. There have been at least 3 remakes with the last being awful.
Planet of the apes in some areas improved but mostly change the storyline to unrecognizable.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Night of the Living Dead.
The originals were fantastic. The repeats in a few early cases had improvements. The latest were merely aimed at audio-visual ADD viewers.
Deleted.. Ben Hur w Charlton Heston was garbage, except the chariot scene and maybe, if i remember correctly, the ‘blessed are the cheesemakers’ scene..😃
Louis B. Mayer produced an awful lot of “message” pictures. He just didn’t call them that. Smart man.
I’m surprised nobody has claimed “The Wizard of Oz” is a “message picture.” Not about climate, although the twister that carried Dorothy and Toto to the Land of Oz was stirring visually, and key to the plot. Nor was the Wizard of Oz a message picture about witchcraft or midgets.
I read years ago that “The Wizard of Oz” — book & movie — sent a not-so-subtle message about prairie populism. L. Frank Baum wrote the book during the heyday of William Jennings Bryan, who built his career on speeches about the noble, rural working folk, and the wicked money powers of the east and west coast banks. By that interpretation, the Tin Woodsman represents industrial workers, the Scarecrow the farmers, the Cowardly Lion the well-meaning but inept folks who sense someone is taking advantage of them.
The Emerald City is Wall Street (Green = money power, get it?) The wicked witches are from the east and west, where the big city banks are. The good witches are from the north and south, where the honest rural folk live and work for insufficient rewards.
The Wizard is the slick media machine that churns out propaganda that beguiles everyone until a little girl and her dog get wise.
This, along with the mass-jettisoning of corporate DEI suggests the pendulum is returning.
“ storms and floods are becoming more frequent,” Bravo?
At that farm, could be. Nothing said it was global or even over a micro climate time span.
It is also bespeaking the individual experience and interpretation. It’s akin to, well over the past couple of years or so….
I guess some genius thought nobody would notice the usual falsehoods being spewed as long as they didn’t say “climate change.”
The original movie “Twister” was a good movie. Fun to watch.
What would a remake look like?
What have most remakes of good movies looked like?
“Twist and Shout!”
Maybe better effects but focused on false “attribution”.
(If Bill Paxton had just bought an EV pickup …)
My understanding is that at least some meteorologists greatly dislike the misnomer “twister” because the phenomenon are tornadoes, so technically even the movie name promotes false information. Good on the director for not promoting even more disinformation with mentions of climate change. Movies are meant for incredulous fun; that’s why Star Wars spacecraft made aerodynamic maneuvers, laser weapons were manned by people that frequently missed, etc…
If people would stop building in the paths of tornadoes and hurricanes, injury and structure insurance metrics would stop rising, but that’s talking about different changes – the climate of insurance assessors, and the behavioral and investment changes of the population.