‘Experts’ Spouting Junk Science Based on Models Tell Ordinary Citizens to Lockdown With Disastrous Results. Does Twisters Remind You of Anything?

Okay, my excuse is it was cold and raining here on England’s Sunshine Coast which is disappointing considering this will shortly be the warmest summer ever. According to the experts. I went to see Twisters – this summers current blockbuster. A lot of other people had the same idea.

For those who don’t know, it’s a revamp of at least two other tornado centred movies set in Clichéville, a small town situated in Stereotype Alley, Oklahoma.

It’s sort of Elon Musk v NASA. Woodstock students all grown up into academic experts v tattooed adherents of the Grand Ol’ Opry with just a touch of Deliverence thrown in. Them v Us. Top Gun v Scooby Do. The Velma-type brainy heroine is a tiny blonde ‘expert’ with round Lennon spectacles instead of a round-necked sweater, small breasts in a sports bra and baggy trousers and left handed for extra intelligence. Hero is in a Cowboy hat with a Maverick Grin, calls himself a ‘wrangler’. You get the picture. Never mind said urban heroine is actually an English actress born in Islington. Home of the expert.

So why is this noisy bubble-gum cinema dangerous? For me the parallels with recent reality during the lockdowns was a bit too raw to ignore.

Junk science presented as ‘cutting edge’ for a start. At one point it was inadvertently admitted that the forecasting came from ‘models’ rather than humans. I expected Ferguson to make a background appearance like Hitchcock liked to do, but thank god we were spared that. Several times, steely-eyed hero & heroine stare into darkening skies and (snatching breath) spot ‘wind sheer’ with the naked eye as being a sign that a tornado conditions are present. Sheer is the result of unstable air, not the cause of it. Never mind – it sounds good. Good eyes them – modern passenger aircraft are equipped with wind-sheer detectors which rely on highly sophisticated and very fast computers to work. I won’t even get into how they propose to control these monstrously powerful storms. Suffice it to say that a hurricane generates about as much energy as 200 times the entire electrical output of the entire earth. Admittedly tornados are a much smaller version, but the ‘experts’ aim to tame using a few barrels of silver iodide and a mysterious ’polymer’ which would no doubt do the environment no end of good when it all came to earth. Never mind, it sounds good. I could go on but I won’t. It’s too painful.

‘Experts’ save the day. As in the Covid lockdowns. Not. At least twice during the film, they abandon their saviour work because the local small town people ‘need our help’. These are academics from urban everywhere. The local Oklahomans who have lived with these things for generations are cyphers. None of them are characters – just country hick proles who need to be told to abandon the rodeo in the face of approaching tornados as if nobody but the experts had noticed. Except one – the heroine’s mum. Apparently our heroine is really a country girl. Raised in these parts but totally ignorant of life in Tornado Alley. (Her mum is played with absolutely no Oklahoma accent by Maura Tierney, last seen as Dominic West’s nearly as naughty wife in The Affair. Lived then in a New York Brownstone and very rich and very urban). The local have to be rounded up from the streets and rushed into lockdown in the local cinema as if that was the safest thing to do. They all obey, screaming, like good if very slow children. In reality they would all have storm cellars, not that you would know it. You’d never get any of them into a flimsy cinema to have the roof come in on them which – spoiler alert – it duly does. But the experts know best, don’t they?

Oh – and it’s also an attack on capitalism. It turns out the NASA-type team were being darkly financed by a sinister slime-ball who makes money by buying up property damaged in the wake of the tornado. So he would like to know where they are going to happen. Pretty obvious would have thought.

Well, it passed an afternoon. The audience loved it to gauge by the whoops when the hero got the heroine in a last second dash to the airport departure lounge. Bit like The Graduate.

I’d like to think it’s all Hollywood schlock but I’m perfectly sure the Nudge Units are happy with the general direction of travel and it keeps the ‘changing weather’ in the news, doesn’t it?

James Leary is the pseudonym of a retired passenger jet Captain.