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.

  • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech
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    3 months ago

    Looks at every film ever made - and then every other piece of media

    If media isn’t supposed to have a message, what the hell has he been watching/reading?

    • Jazzy Vidalia@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      3 months ago

      It’s newspeak for “I don’t want messages that I disgree with in my media.”

      Just like when conservatives complain about something being “political” they mean “progressive” and by progressive I mean “they saw a minority.”

      It’s a way of saying something without saying it.

      • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech
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        3 months ago

        Oh yeah, sorry a bit of tongue in cheek sarcasm there. We all know films have always had messages, storytelling has always had a message. It’s just they had a weather disaster movie and now (and going forward) it’s going to be pretty much impossible for hollywood to avoid climate change when doing a weather disaster story.