Pirate's Cove

Climate cranks are still upset that the movie Twisters ignores preaching about global boiling. How dare a director and all the rest involved want to just make a good movie that a lot of people will come see because they know they won’t be Preached at (Via Watts Up With That?)

‘It affects everything’: why is Hollywood so scared to tackle the climate crisis?

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.

Most big movies that go for Messaging crash at the box office. Even most lefties do not want to be preached to, they just want enjoyment when they pay a lot to see a movie. Perhaps the UK Guardian and Warmist David Smith can pony up the money to make the climate doom movie they want made?

By the way, how much fossil fuel is used to make movies?

The most notable recent example of a film that did tackle the topic – albeit via allegory – was Don’t Look Up, a 2021 satire about two scientists who try in vain to warn the world about a planet-destroying comet.

Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep and Cate Blanchett, the film memorably depicted TV hosts consumed by trivia rather than the extinction event – a stark warning about humanity’s ongoing insouciance as the planet burns.

Its writer and director, Adam McKay, says via email: “I had become aware of the specific science and risk of rapid climate warming about five to six years ago and soon after began having trouble sleeping. (snip)

“We’re talking about 8 billion people reacting to oil companies destroying the entire livable climate. We need stories in hundreds of different languages, reflecting a thousand times more cultures experiencing varying degrees of awareness and emotional processing.”

He adds: “But if a film-maker is reluctant to let climate be in some way a part of their movie, I always tell them that it’s a guarantee within the next five years their film will play as irrelevant as movies do today about how noble the war against the ‘American Indians’ was.”

And guess what? Don’t Look Up failed. It did terrible at the box office, viewers aren’t all that interested on Netflix, and it was a garbage movie. People do not want to be preached to in their entertainment. Anyway, here we go

Asked whether film-makers have an ethical responsibility to tackle the subject, Lipsky identifies a parallel with slavery: “The model is Uncle Tom’s Cabin. That issue had to be addressed and so Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote that novel. When Lincoln had an audience with her at the White House, he said, so you’re the woman who caused this civil war of ours. Sometimes the expression of something can be so astonishing and so direct that it makes people take action.

Read: Climate Wackos Say Putting ‘Climate Change’ In Movies Is Like Preaching Against Slavery »