When the storm chasers in the original Tornado When faced with an unprecedented weather event, they can’t believe their eyes. Helen Hunt’s meteorologist is practically overjoyed when she informs her colleagues that “this is the biggest series of storms in 12 years, one after the other,” adding that the National Severe Storms Laboratory has “never seen anything like this.” Tornadoes The film picks up nearly 30 years later, but extreme weather is no longer such an extraordinary phenomenon. At least in Tornado Alley, the vertical strip of the central United States where the films take place, the 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 bargain prices or a social media star like Tyler Owens, played by Glen Powell, who drives his specially modified pickup truck into danger and flashes a beaming smile for 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 catch the storms. They have to master them.
For an overtly over-the-top (in every sense of the word) blockbuster, the original Tornado The stakes are surprisingly low. After watching her father get sucked into a tornado as a child, Hunt’s Jo Harding has devoted her life to research that, if successful, would increase the warning time before storms hit from three to 15 minutes — enough time for more people to get to safety, sure, but hardly enough time to do anything about the rest of the destruction that storms typically wreak. (By one estimate, a four-day series of tornadoes in April caused more than $2 billion in property damage.) Sequel logic demands that Tornadoes The stakes are high, which is why Kate Cooper, the weatherwoman played by Daisy Edgar-Jones (who, like Hunt’s character, is motivated by the loss of loved ones in the tornado and also spends most of the film in a white tank top), isn’t just looking to give people a head start. She’s looking, in her words, to “tame” the tornadoes, using hyperabsorbent materials to deprive them of the moisture they feed on.
Despite three decades of technological advances, Kate’s long-awaited solution still involves speeding trucks through wheat fields and hoping the storm gets close enough to suck up their cargo—barrels filled with sodium polyacrylate, the same stuff that, as one character points out early on, is used in diapers. In 2005, diaper gel magnate Peter Cordani proposed a far more ambitious plan, using a fleet of 747s to dump the stuff into hurricanes, and scientists and entrepreneurs have come up with even more ambitious methods, plans they hope could mitigate and even reverse the effects of climate change itself, like changing the composition of clouds so they reflect more sunlight. Because as a long-term rise in global temperature has gone from a possibility to a near certainty, something else has also become clear: Warnings, however dire and stark, are simply not enough.
But focusing on broader solutions would require acknowledging broader problems, which Tornadoes director Lee Isaac Chung (to pain) has been reluctant to do so. A few weeks ago, Chung appeared at the Hollywood Climate Summit, along with real scientists who testified to the film’s veracity. “Climate change is a very real phenomenon that we’re all dealing with, and we’re seeing the effects of it,” said the film’s “tornado consultant,” Sean Waugh, and the characters in the film frequently talk about how things have gotten worse in recent times. Because tornadoes are extremely localized phenomena, scientists have had a hard time pinpointing exactly how rising global temperatures are affecting them, but the storms have behaved differently in recent years, appearing more frequently in clusters, and some theorize that we’ll see more and more destructive storms as temperatures continue to rise.
Chung, who grew up in rural Arkansas, is sensitive to what he calls “the reality of what’s happening on the ground.” Unlike the first film, Tornadoes The film reflects a realization that the sight of homes being torn apart by high winds is not simply a spectacle offered for easy consumption. But Chung also deliberately avoids any mention of what might contribute to that reality. Preaching messages, he told CNN, “is not what cinema should be about, in my opinion.” Tornadoes Talk about Why Things could get worse. That’s just the way it is, and we all have to deal with it.
Or maybe not? Instead of a message about climate change, Chung’s film puts forward a different idea: Don’t worry, science has it all figured out. There is little evidence that the diaper gel solution can actually stop tornadoes, and decades of other proposals, including one that involves using satellites to bombard the atmosphere with microwaves, have also failed to bear fruit. TornadoesAll it takes is a combination of new discoveries with old ones (Kate particles and the chemicals used for so-called cloud seeding since the mid-1940s) and a mixture of intuition and sheer bravado. All you have to do is believe.
These geoengineering solutions are particularly appealing because they don’t require any change. We can continue to consume as we please, safe in the knowledge that some smart person, now or in the future, will find a way to plug the hole faster than we can dig it. The problem is that when their powers aren’t bolstered by the magic of Hollywood storytelling, these solutions remain largely theoretical, and the unintended negative consequences of altering the planet’s chemistry could be severe. Not to mention that most geoengineering proposals call for global carbon reductions equal to or greater than those set out in the 2015 Paris Agreement. Geoengineering, according to a study last year, is not a silver bullet for climate catastrophe, but it could take up to a century to make a lasting difference. Tornadoes“The film’s climax is the characters taking refuge in a small-town movie theater, but the building isn’t strong enough to withstand the storm raging outside; walls are ripped out and bodies are flying through the hole where the screen used to be. The problem is literally bigger than a movie can do. contain.