We watched (and bought*) Twisters 'tonight' - and it was totally, absolutely pretty good. For context, Twister was a movie that came about in the heart of my youth and is a movie that I truly love, unironically, and unapologetically. It came out when I was 18 years old and weeks away from graduating high school, and it imprinted on me. Twister is earnest, a little schlocky (in all the best ways), and a fairly fun ride (literally, too, as Brooke and I did the Twister ride at Universal Studios Florida, although not actually literally as the ride wasn't that great - I just remember standing in a room with a fence, and then it was kind of windy, but not at you, just near you...).
Anyway, the point is - Twister is a pretty okay movie that comes to some relevant (if somewhat cliched) conclusions - "Making something of yourself" and "Don't be a total sellout" and "Love love (or no divorce allowed or something...)". The science bits / meteorology / plot stuff is all very good. There's a science bucket full of science puffins, and if they get the bucket in front of the twister and all the puffins fly up into it, they get science to speak tornado!
Twisters on the other hand starts with some children hobbyists who have a geo-engineering science fair project that ends in tragedy. The tragedy of standing in front of a tornado and being killed by it - shocker.
The first mistake was to make the movie as a completely standalone sequel - like, it didn't need to integrate big parts of the earlier cast, but some cameos and nods to the earlier work would have been nice. And grounding it in the 'science' of the earlier - a bit of "standing on the shoulders of giants" - I think might have grounded the plot in some semblance of the realistic, but of course those are not themes that we like in our current era, whether fictional or non-fictional.
The young will save us, and a profound disinterest in the ideas that came before... (generally before 2015 or so if you investigate the thinking very deeply). The absolute importance of being liked - and if you aren't liked publicly (praised visibly), then you may as well not bother.
The central message of this far inferior sequel seems to be about "Ways to 'keep' getting ahead". The happy ending isn't anything about doing good science for the world, or even like getting married or being happy or anything but frakking starting a company!
Congratulations!, You made it, please begin exploiting...
{sigh}
* renting on Amazon Prime is a total scam - the cost of buying is generally just under double the cost of renting, and I feel like most movies - you will find another time in life when you are going to watch it or show it or reference it, so just own it forever (until Amazon collapses, which at this rate will likely be after the US government collapses!).
No comments:
Post a Comment