Twisters: if only we had 20 barrels of polymerwhatsit, some silver iodide and a way to fire it into the clouds.

Spoiler alert, cloud seeding saves us from extreme weather.

Of course it was going to be propaganda about extreme weather and the climate scam but I went to see Twisters anyway. It’s the summer holidays, the kids wanted to see something, and that’s what was on. I’m also quite keen on keeping up with the latest messaging from the environmentalist doomsday cult and the way they seek to normalise technocracy, “The Science”, and scientists as earth’s new Avengers, so I was happy to pop along.

So here is a quick rundown so you don’t have to see it.

Imagine a Hallmark “will they/won’t they?” movie, with a bigger budget, crossed with Jaws —there are plenty of scenes where people are dragged, feet first, off into the teeth of a storm, their faces flush with terror at what’s chomping and their legs —but there are tornados rather than sharks terrorising small towns.

The plot is simple. A PhD student (Daisy) has a plan to release a trailer load of polymerwhatsits in barrels into the eye of a tornado in order to stop it in its tracks. This requires parking in the middle of one. She picks a whooper (an F5) by mistake and most of her friends get killed in the attempt.

Five years later she’s all a bit PTSD and working in a desk job predicting storm threats to small towns. She bumps into the only other surviving friend from the F5 (Javi). Javi has scored a big grant to chase and measure tornados with some snazzy equipment. He persuades Daisy to get involved. She has a knack for reading the weather and working out where a storm is brewin’—although she’s filled with self doubt about her gift after underestimating the size of the one that reduced the size of her Scooby gang. Off she goes, reluctantly, to chase storms again.

The team gather with other gangs of storm chasers. Among the other teams is a YouTuber (Tyler) who calls himself a storm wrangler. He’s the arrogant, all American, cheeky-chappy who will banter, offend, inspire and, in the end, fall for the main protagonist Daisy.

It turns out that Javi’s grant money comes from a corporate sort who wants to take advantage of the lower real estate value of land recently vacated by towns and villages. He moves in on home owners, looking through their wreckage after a tornado has passed through, and offers them a deal they can’t refuse. The tension builds between Tyler and Daisy, who want to help folk who have had their towns destroyed by erratic storms, and Javi and his crew who just want the data.

While Javi heads off into a storm to collect data, Tyler and Daisy head into town to help clear up. Javi gets into a fix as the storm he is chasing rips through an oil refinery which goes up in flames like Chernobyl. The message is clear, you don’t want an oil refinery at the bottom of your garden on a windy day. However, wind farms tend to fair better in this film. The odd blade gets ripped off a turbine and daggers into the ground near a truck, but, on the whole, the most an F5 will do is make one spin too fast making it pop in comparison to the effects of wind on a fossil fuel refinery. This experience seems to begin a change in Javi’s attitude.

In the meantime, Daisy realises Javi is up to no good, and drives off in his truck back to her mum’s farm. In the barn she finds her old tornado stopping experiments. Tyler shows up and inspires her to try again. In a conversation with Daisy’s mum they work out the missing ingredient. Her mum comments that “they” cloud seed to help farmers (!) using silver iodide.

Cut to the end sequence: an F5 heads towards a town. As it nears the edge, buildings are being torn apart and the requisite number of residents — enough to illustrate threat but not too many to exhaust the population and have a few left over to save— are sucked up into the storm. The rest of the residents all hide in the cinema (yes the cinema —just like the building you might be sitting in while watching it). On the screen an old black and white sci-fi flick (I think it was Frankenstein’s Monster) is playing. This is an homage to the first Twister movie, where the storm ripped through a drive-in movie theatre while they watched The Shining. Eventually the wall is torn off the cinema, the screen is sucked out and the audience, clinging to their chairs, looks on at the storm where the film used to be. The message? You sit there in your seat and think this is science fiction? Let us tear back the screen and show you real life weather horror!

Daisy, now dressed in a kind of Lara Croft meets X-men outfit (with inexplicable clips and straps) decides the only hope is for her to drive Tyler’s truck with the trailer full of ploymerwhatsits and silver iodide into the eye of the storm and release the barrels. She parks up and presses the nifty cork screw button which sends a couple of drills down into the ground securing the truck to the spot — a bit like a mechanical bum clench as the wind passes through. Off go the barrels, sucked up into the storm and this time it works.

The scene changes to a blue sky with an aeroplane cutting through it with trails coming out the back. Yup, it really does! Look kids, join the dots. The camera pans down to an airport where Tyler and Daisy will have their “will they won’t they?” moment. Tyler uses his cork screws to bolt the truck to the drop off only zone (I really want to do that) and runs into the airport to find Daisy. In the end credits, Tyler and Daisy’s exploits in tornado prevention are shown and we get messages like “weather research is filled with heroes”.

Nowhere, if I recall correctly, is climate change mentioned but it is everywhere assumed. The movie promotes the assumption that extreme weather is the new normal which must be tackled by science for ordinary towns and villages to survive and that cloud seeding helps farmers. There is a storm denier who carries on refusing to listen to the scientists as the motel she is in explodes around her: she heads off and gets into a truck, against their advice, instead of hiding in a disused swimming pool, and gets sucked up into the air, never to be seen again.

The overall sense of the movie is to normalise the idea that extreme weather is happening and the need for scientists to pump chemicals into the air. The bad people are deniers and those who are happy to do nothing, they must be trying to profit from other people’s misfortune who live in the path of erratic weather.

I remember when environmental activists campaigned against squirting chemicals into the environment. These days, Hollywood tells us that injecting chemicals into the body and the sky are needed for a safer life. Even the weather needs a jab.

Let me know if you’ve seen Twisters and what you thought of it.

Ttfn

Jonny