Why are weather disaster movies so fascinating for us?

I have just watched the movie Twisters, a remake of the 1996 movie Twister, which I enjoyed back in the day.

There are some differences, but the same basic plot; a weather scientist who has an almost mystic ability to predict tornadoes, trying to find a way to prevent them and so stop the tremendous damage that they wreak to human lives. It’s well made and fun; but this is not a review of the movie. What it made me reflect upon is why I like disaster weather movies so much.

Powerful weather

I have watched a good many of them. I am fascinated by powerful weather. As a child and teenager I used to love walking along the breakwall at any of the beaches we lived near on the NSW north coast, especially in the evening when the wind was getting up and huge waves would crash against the rocks. In a storm it was even better. I love thunderstorms and lightning. I am fascinated by images of tsunamis and hurricanes and, yes, tornadoes.

It seems I’m not alone in that, for big weather movies keep being made, and it seems that Twisters, like the original, is doing well at the box office. A movie about the weather. Why is something like that so popular?

I read one article that suggested that it is because of global warming and the fear that people have about future extreme weather events. Possibly; but I would suggest that climate panic is simply another symptom of the same cause.

Powerless humans

Humans fear, and are fascinated by, the power of nature. For it is immense, and awe-inspiring. It demonstrates to us just how powerless we are. It is no surprise that weather gods peopled the ancient world. The natural human instinct to worship something is easily directed towards the tremendous power of the natural world, its destructive power in particular. It is still with us; the current intense focus on the natural world, which goes under the respectable names of environmentalism or climate-change science, has elements of nature worship in it.

The ancient Near East was no different. Baal, who so often drew the worshippers of Yahweh off into idolatry, was a storm god. He represented the huge power that people could see and experience all the time; in an agricultural economy, he could easily appear to be not just powerful but needing to be propitiated.

The real power behind nature

Yet Yahweh is scornful. ‘Ascribe to Yahweh the glory due to his name,’ Psalm 29 says. ‘For the voice of Yahweh is over the waters; the God of glory thunders’. It is Yahweh who is the power that breaks trees, flashes with lightning, shakes the desert (Ps. 29: 5, 7, 9). And in the temple, all cry ‘Glory!’ (Ps. 29:9). As well they should. It is not a god of nature, even of storms, who should be worshipped; it is the One who created all of it who actually has the power.

The other human reaction to this power of nature is to try to control it. That is also not surprising; we were created to have dominion, and we keep on trying, despite our constant failure. The movie is just another example of that. We will keep attempting to control nature, and to some extent we will succeed; God created us with dominion-like powers, after all. But those powers have been frustrated, and we will never succeed as well as we think we ought. After all, the 1996 movie ended with the heroes ‘succeeding’ in their scientific quest to understand tornadoes. The fact that there is a new movie with exactly the same plot 30 years later testifies to just how well that worked.

As long as we fail to recognise the real power behind nature, it will continue to both fascinate and frustrate us. That’s because neither nature, nor ourselves, has the answer.