The new movie addresses climate change in a way that's rather, uh, unconventional.
When the storm chasers in the original Twister happen upon an unprecedented weather event, they can't believe their luck. Helen Hunt's meteorologist is practically giddy with excitement when she informs her colleagues that "it's the biggest series of storms in 12 years, one lined up right after the other," adding that the National Severe Storms Laboratory has "never seen anything like it." But by the time Twisters picks up the story nearly 30 years later, extreme weather is no longer such an extraordinary occurrence. At least in Tornado Alley, the vertical strip in the Central U.S. where the movies take place, dramatic and destructive storms are regular enough that you can build a business plan around them, whether you're a land baron buying up properties at fire-sale prices or a social-media star like Glen Powell's Tyler Owens, who steers his specially modified pickup truck into harm's way and flashes a gleaming grin to the camera amid the chaos. For Tyler and his band of thrill-seeking misfits, who call themselves the Tornado Wranglers, it's not enough to just catch up with the storms. They have to master them. For an unabashedly overblown (in every sense) blockbuster, the original Twister has surprisingly modest stakes. After watching her father get sucked up by a tornado when she was a child, Hunt's Jo Harding has dedicated her life to research that, if successful, would increase the warning time before storms strike from three to 15 minutes—enough time for more people to get to safety, sure, but hardly enough to do anything about the rest of the destruction those storms typically wreak. (According to one estimate, a four-day tornado outbreak in April caused more than $2 billion in property damage.) The logic of sequels requires that Twisters raise the stakes, and so Daisy Edgar-Jones' meteorologist Kate Cooper—who, like Hunt's character, is driven by the tornado-related loss of loved ones, and similarly spends the bulk of the movie in a white tank top—isn't…