The outpouring of support from Hollywood for Vice President Kamala Harris’s candidacy has been (yet) another stark reminder of how partisan our entertainment industry is. Hollywood has been privately left-wing offscreen for years, but recently, the town has become unavoidably partisan on screen as well.
While many conservatives have been quick to boycott entertainment that’s too woke, we also need to support entertainment that isn’t.
Therefore, I strongly recommend Lee Isaac Chung’s Twisters, released last week.
Following the naming convention of Alien and Aliens, Twisters is a sequel to the 1996 Helen Hunt/Bill Paxton vehicle Twister – a disaster film most famous for the CGI cow scene. Although Twisters is yet another “legacy sequel no one asked for,” it’s actually smarter and more fun than the original – in addition to being downright conservative.
The film follows Daisy Edgar-Jones, a breadbasket-born meteorologist who unironically opens the film saying, “I love Oklahoma” – one of the reddest states there is. She later crosses path with YouTubers from Arkansas who chase tornadoes for clicks rather than the science.
Yes, the heroes are rednecks!
The tornado-tubers’ leader, Glen Powell, is most familiar to audiences who saw Top Gun: Maverick, the gloriously anti-woke Tom Cruise vehicle that brought in $1.5 billion in 2022. Twisters won’t do anywhere near as well, but it doesn’t need to: the film has broken box office records with an unexpected domestic haul of $80.5 million that (wait for it) “blew away the competition” – proving that there is indeed a market for red state entertainment, and an even bigger market for just good movies. Had the film been released over July 4th, it could have done even better.
The film features a diverse cast, but they just all get along and work as a team … sort of the way America did in 1996 when the first Twister was released. At no point does anyone deliver a moronic, eyeroll-inducing message about how racism causes cancer, nor has the film been caught with its woke pants down for making a big deal about diversity while shrinking black faces in Asian advertising.
Twisters is a whirlwind of American flags, cowboy hats, and rodeos. The soundtrack is all country music. Edgar-Jones’s protagonist is a capable heroine, but never an obnoxious girl-boss who rails against the patriarchy that (surely) must exist within America’s oppressive tornado-chasing community – which one imagines was built on a legacy of indigenous genocide.
At the film’s climax, SPOILER she realizes it’s better for her to stay in Oklahoma than move to New York City. Red states for the win!
What impressed me the most was that the movie – whose story directly concerns dangerous weather phenomena – includes exactly zero references to the existential! threat! of climate! change! This omission was so noticeable that it has even drawn ire from left-wing pundits. The original likewise avoided references to the 90s environmental cause du jours – the existential! threat! of the hole! in the ozone! layer!
If you’re too young, the hole in the ozone layer was supposed to kill us but never happened. The premise of 1995’s Waterworld was how the ozone hole would melt the polar ice caps, which would make for an embarrassing legacy sequel if that ever gets greenlit.
Either the writers of Twisters figured an on-screen lecture about the “climate crisis” would look just as embarrassing down the road as one about the ozone layer would have or they figured that the last group to pontificate about pollution should be Hollywood’s entitled mega-millionaires who fly everywhere in private jets.
If politics is downwind from culture, then we can be encouraged by well-made cultural touchstones like this. The same way conservatives gave a boost to The Sound of Freedom last year, we should do the same for Twisters. Let’s blow the liberals in Hollywood away.
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