The initial purpose of Twisters is to serve as a “spiritual successor” to the story of Twister, the 1996 classic featuring Bill Paxton, Helen Hunt, and Philip Seymour Hoffman among others. The main characters of our 2024 film, played by Daisy Edgar-Jones, Anthony Ramos, and Glen Powell, all embrace the love of the hunt. The hunt, of course, is for tornadoes. Yet much like the original film, Twisters quickly expands beyond the initial desire to chase tornadoes into much deeper questions.
One has to begin with the main three characters, and their purposes for being involved in such a story. Daisy Edgar-Jones’s plucky and intelligent Kate struggles with the memory of her friends’ traumatic deaths as the result of a storm-chasing experiment gone disastrously wrong. Anthony Ramos’s brooding and ambitious Javier, her childhood friend, has grown from those experiences, and has decided to finish his education and to take a team of well-equipped FEMA, NOAA, and MIT scientists to catch 3D radar scans of a tornado. His goal, at least at first, is to save small towns from severe weather. And then there is Glen Powell’s dashing and mischievous Tyler Owens, a “tornado wrangler” whose bold, flashy, and reckless behavior almost ruins Kate and Javi’s reunion.
In the original Twister, Bill chases tornadoes for scientific data, whereas his enemy, Jonas, chases them for sponsorships and the money. But those goals have evolved over the intervening decades, and just as Javi’s machines require three panels to catch a full 3D image of a tornado, each of the three characters is a panel that provides a unique angle to the discussion of the dispersion of scientific information. How does one properly use such information, in an age in which information is both immediate for some and unreachable for many?
Science is inherently both human and divine, and Catholic Social Teaching gives us a road-map for the usage of science in the broader human world. Catholic Social Teaching considers seven major concepts for the proper dispersion of services and information:
- Life and Dignity of the Human Person
- Solidarity
- Care for God’s Creation
- Call to Family, Community, and Participation
- Option for the Poor and Vulnerable
- Rights and Responsibilities
- Dignity of Work and Rights of Workers
Through the three viewpoints of our main characters, Twisters explores three of these themes. Kate struggles with her rights and responsibilities as a meteorologist, as she measures using her desire to improve her storm-chasing skills with her compassion for the innocent people of rural Oklahoma who are subjected to several outbreaks throughout the movie. She wants to recover from her PTSD, she wants to reconnect with her close friend, and she wants to explore her relationship with Tyler Owens. It takes a tornado hitting a rural town (which apparently doesn’t have tornado sirens, despite being in Oklahoma) for her to realize that she can truly connect these goals together.
In the meantime, Javi struggles to decide how best to provide for the poor and needy of those communities. Radar dead zones, a lack of tornado resources for non-English speakers, and even a lack of sirens in very rural areas leave a significant amount of poor Americans at the mercy of severe weather, but Javi must choose whether to devote his limited resources to these larger-scale problems or to provide immediate aid in the wake of disaster. Finally, Tyler exemplifies the call to take care of the community. While he seems on the surface to only care for views, his team’s rush to care for injured civilians after a tornado destroys their town brings to light his desire to end their suffering, and to raise enough money to bring supplies to rebuild those communities.
These three characters are close matches to three real-life celebrity meteorologists and storm-chasers. Kate is a stand-in for Tim Samaras, the self-trained and enthusiastic meteorologist whose goal was studying tornadoes for the purpose of constructing buildings better able to withstand destructive weather. While she has to fight through her own fears and her inability to communicate her needs, Kate’s desires are largely cerebral, until she almost sacrifices her own life for the sake of science and performs an unlikely maneuver to save a town and all of her friends from a massive tornado. Likewise, Samaras died conducting his research during one of the most infamous tornadoes on record, the El Reno tornado of 2013. Ultimately, Kate’s and Tim’s austere, scientific goals are to better understand severe weather. While those goals are originally filmed for entertainment (as Tim Samaras was also a star in Discovery Channel’s Storm Chasers), others eventually recognize those goals to have wide-reaching benefits for their field and for people living in Tornado Alley.
Javi, as a university-educated meteorologist who seeks to produce data for small towns without radar systems, represents Ryan Hall. Their career paths address the precept of care for creation. Javi’s machines gather data to examine how tornadoes affect buildings in Tornado Alley, while Ryan Hall’s videos serve to educate the common public about tornado safety and the paths of tornadoes throughout the year. For an example, let’s look at Ryan Hall’s stream of the 2023 Rolling Fork-Silver City tornado in eastern Mississippi. While Hall’s stream of the larger outbreak might initially seem to serve a purpose of boosting Ryan’s own fame, his streams provide an invaluable service to small communities with no sirens or access to larger aid after severe weather events. Inhabitants of Rolling Fork, a community of about 400 people, have said that Ryan Hall’s stream was their only warning of the massive EF-4 storm, and that he had saved their lives.
It is important to note that the movie itself seems to bounce back and forth between showing Javi’s desire as noble or self-serving. While I would argue that much of this conflict is artificially created to make a villain out of Javi and a hero out of Tyler, it allows for the balancing of goals to emerge on the big screen. Javi eventually remembers why he started using the machines in the first place: not to help big businesses sell homes in Oklahoma, but to support the common people who have no way to defend themselves against tornadoes. Likewise, in the span of his own career, Ryan Hall has commendably chosen to use his platform to advocate for better weather education.
Perhaps the most controversial and difficult position is Tyler’s, which mirrors the work and celebrity of extreme meteorologist Reed Timmer. Tyler’s university training seems like a nod to Timmer’s doctorate in meteorology from the University of Oklahoma. Both characters have the same loud, dashing, and often-memed personalities. Both stars claimed their fame from social media or popular television, with Tyler having a very popular YouTube channel and with Reed having started his rise to fame with the Discovery Channel reality series Storm Chasers. Both characters polarize the weather community at large due to their dangerous and reckless behavior.
Yet Tyler’s own journey reflects on the precept of caring for the poor and vulnerable. During one of the movie’s tornado outbreaks, Tyler and his team race to bring food, supplies, and clean-up for the town that takes the brunt of the damage. The movie adds some complexity to this apparently one-dimensional thrill seeker, as he helps Katie to protect a family caught outside during another tornado, and then as he later helps Javi to get a town full of people to safety in the movie’s climax. Ultimately, the movie characterizes Tyler as a rather unorthodox charity worker, who uses the money from his ridiculous YouTube stunts to help the towns torn apart by the same natural disasters.
While there exists the obvious caveat to not try any of these characters’ stunts at home, Catholics and Christians are indeed called to a height of bravery when it comes to supporting the poor and downtrodden, to caring for creation, and to participate in one’s community. Catholic Charities, Mercy Chefs, and other Christian agencies are often at the center of any natural disaster, serving those who require critical help in their time of need. Yet that charity also requires the ingenuity of a generation of young scientists, meteorologists, and even storm-watchers who are able to build a world that can better withstand the most awe-striking and frightening events that Mother Nature can create. We must support those young scientists, and likewise nurture their faith to see that God has created great minds for our times, if only we will allow Him to guide them.
Twisters, much like the original Twister, is ultimately a movie for this year, not a timeless classic. Too much time is spent with a cliche-filled love triangle and with lazy character assassination. Yet the question the characters confront about ethics in science is one that goes far back beyond themselves, back to the Cross. After all, to understand the science of service, and the service of science, one must look to the hands of One who died for the salvation and the progression of many to the eternal place of peace. In such a cross, the positions of Kate, Javi, and Tyler find their most perfect completion. Without selfishness, without competition, and in a place in which, as the book of Revelations tells us about our personal traumas and fears, all tears are wiped away.
