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Nevertheless, in more than two hours of extreme-weather depiction, the makers of “Twisters” opted to exclude even the tiniest nod to the chief driver of extreme weather.

In an interview with CNN’s Thomas Page, the movie’s director, Lee Isaac Chung, said, “I just don’t feel like films are meant to be message-oriented.”

It is not — and does not aspire to be — high cinematic art.

It is, however, a golden opportunity to talk about what scientists know and don’t know about how climate change might be affecting the formation, strength, frequency and geographic distribution of tornadoes, or why they now tend to develop in groups.

There’s a lot of talk in this movie about how tornadoes are getting bigger and more frequent, how they’re popping up in places, like New York City, that don’t historically experience the meteorological conditions that would spawn a tornado

There’s no talk at all about the science of global climate breakdown and what it will mean for people in the path of its destruction. That’s all of us.

if these filmmakers had allowed their characters — who include, after all, research scientists and climatologists — to muse aloud about how climate change might be affecting their work. In between lines like, “We’ve never seen tornadoes like this before,” would it have hurt to introduce, however briefly, the idea that something much bigger than a tornado threatens the planet those scientists are studying?

I’m guessing the decision to exclude even a passing reference to climate change in a film about weather disasters has very little to do with cinematic art, or even with climate science, and everything to do with avoiding the cross hairs of political polarity.

artifacts of popular culture have always had immense power to articulate changing attitudes, engage empathy and open firmly resistant minds. Think about how swiftly Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” changed attitudes toward the fragile natural world and led to new regulations of synthetic pesticides

how Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” and John Prine’s “Paradise” expanded awareness of the environmental movement.

the CBS drama “Madam Secretary” proved that even a single episode with a climate-based story line could significantly affect viewers’ understanding of the human costs of climate change.

his is why Percy Bysshe Shelley called poets “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” When art changes opinions or opens hearts, it changes the world as profoundly as any legislation does.

With MAGA politicians at every level denying that climate change even exists, real climate legislation is now nearly impossible to pass. And with the Supreme Court determined to quash all executive-branch efforts to address the changing climate, too, we seem to be at the mercy of artists to save us.

In a missed opportunity the size of an F5 tornado’s debris field, we got no help from the makers of “Twisters.”