A rodeo crowd waves cowboy hats as a man rides a bucking horse. Then comes a shower of leaves, a chorus of mobile phone rings and a wail of klaxons. Horses run wild and cars collide. One vehicle is whipped into the air by what a weatherman calls a once-in-a-generation tornado outbreak.
This is a scene from Twisters, starring Glen Powell and Daisy Edgar-Jones, in which rivals come together to try to predict and possibly tame ferocious storms in central Oklahoma. A sequel to the hit disaster movie Twister from 1996, it is a Hollywood summer blockbuster designed to entertain – but also a lost opportunity to raise awareness of the climate crisis.
“I just wanted to make sure that with the movie, we don’t ever feel like [it] is putting forward any message,” director Lee Isaac Chung, who grew up in Oklahoma’s tornado belt, told CNN. “I just don’t feel like films are meant to be message-oriented.”
That may not come as a surprise to scientists and climate activists. Despite global heating’s existential threat to humanity, and despite Hollywood’s left-leaning tendencies, the subject rarely makes it to the big screen.
A study published by the nonprofit consultancy Good Energy and Colby College’s Buck Lab for Climate and Environment analysed whether the climate crisis was present in 250 of the top-grossing fictional films between 2013 and 2022. In only 32 of the films (12.8%) was it clear that climate change exists, and in only 24 of them (9.6%) was it clear that a character knows it.
Don’t Look Up was meant to be about climate change. But its depiction of tribalism and news media psyops was so good that everyone assumed it was about COVID, which had happened after the movie wrapped filming but before it released. If it had come out a couple years earlier the message would have been clearer, but then people also probably wouldn’t have resonated with it as much because most people don’t care as much about climate change as they did about the pandemic one way or the other at that key time.
Wait… People don’t realise that don’t look yo is obviously about climate change!?
Keep in mind it came out right around the same time that the first COVID vaccines were becoming widely available and the antivaxxer movement was kicking into maximum wackadoo mode.
Less than a month after DLU came out was when antivaxxer assholes from all over Canada drove to Ottawa to terrorize the citizens of the city in order to try and strongarm the federal government into getting rid of any vaccine and masking mandates
Yeah, of course science denial is science denial. There is going to be major thematic links…
But it’s so blatantly obviously climate is the primary focus there.