Director Lee Isaac Chung is by all accounts a talented and thoughtful filmmaker. Minari, his 2020 film about a Korean family who moved from their comfortable Californian home to start a farm in Arkansas, won all the awards including an Oscar for Youn Yuh-jung as Best Supporting Actress. Next up is Twisters, his first blockbuster and a sequel to the 1996 masterpiece, Twister. Given Lee’s childhood in Arkansas, filming experience for Minari in Tornado Alley, and Twisters’ plot, you’d be forgiven for thinking climate change might get a mention. But you’d be wrong.
“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 explained in an interview with CNN. “I just don’t feel like films are meant to be message-oriented.”
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“I think what we are doing is showing the reality of what’s happening on the ground … we don’t shy away from saying that things are changing,” Lee added. He name-checked Maura Tierney’s character Cathy, mother of Kate, as a voice for all this. Cathy, a local farmer, gripes that storms and floods are becoming more frequent, and the price of wheat more expensive, while stopping short of citing climate change.
“I wanted to make sure that we are never creating a feeling that we’re preaching a message, because that’s certainly not what I think cinema should be about,” said Lee. “I think it should be a reflection of the world.”
It’s a statement that made me tilt my head like a confused border collie. It’s true that we’re still learning about tornadoes. But we know that the ideal conditions for tornado formation are becoming more common. Geographic areas where tornadoes were century storms are getting hammered. New areas are seeing tornado warnings and even funnel clouds. And energy companies have known for decades that our transportation and manufacturing emissions were a major driver for climate change, despite misinformation campaigns to convince people otherwise. It’s a bit like making a movie about a burning house without mentioning it sits atop an active volcano.
But it’s Lee’s movie and he can put in or leave out anything he likes. My feeling is that we should be confronting audiences watching meteorological disaster porn with the uncomfortable reality rather than ignoring it, but I understand the desire for a box office win. What I find odder is the idea that movies shouldn’t have a message. Nearly every movie has a message. One of fiction’s main purposes has always been to guide its audiences. Religious myths, literature, paintings, all of it. Sometimes, that message is a statement on what makes someone American and how to merge family traditions like what occurs in Lee’s own Minari. Sometimes it’s that you shouldn’t scam senior citizens even if you’re the failson of a powerful politician unless you want Jason Statham murdering you in the face. I never said it had to be a profound statement.
And the thing about reflections? They are by definition flat, empty, and lack depth. That doesn’t sound like any halfway decent movie I’ve ever watched. It doesn’t even sound like a lot of the bad ones. I’ll take someone’s deeply flawed passion project over the monotony of a film done just for the paycheck any day. So I assume Lee just misspoke. The thought he doesn’t believe his own movies are more than flat reflections is deeply depressing.