Twisters doesn’t mention climate change to avoid seeming preachy

It would have made sense if Twisted – a film about storm chasers who study a series of extraordinarily powerful and destructive tornadoes – included climate change in its story. But in a recent interview with CNNdirector Lee Isaac Chung said that while he thinks cinema “should be a reflection of the world,” he avoided mentioning climate change in Twisted because he doesn’t “feel that films should be message-oriented.”

Chung pointed to the way some of the TwistedThe characters talk about the weather as one of the ways the film comments on “the reality of what’s happening on the ground” and insist that their intention is not to “avoid saying that things are changing.” But when we consider how scientists have discovered that conditions that create tornado-producing storms are more likely in a warming world, Twisted‘ avoiding the phrase “climate change” seems to evade and more.

But these are exactly the kinds of ideas that can make films like Twisted interesting and feels like a thoughtful evolution of a franchise, which began as a story about storm chasers using technology to better understand tornadoes. And with Twisted Falling at such a meteorologically wild time, the film’s refusal to mention climate change will likely make it seem even sillier than it already does when it opens on July 19.