I supposed technically Margeret Renkl isn’t a film reviewer for the Times: officially she’s a “contributing opinion writer who covers flora, fauna, politics and culture in the American South.” I don’t care: she criticizes an action movie that audiences are enjoying because it doesn’t deliver the progressive agenda propaganda that she thinks good little Big Brotherites should jam into the brains of the trusting public at every opportunity.

Renkle can bite me, and so can the Times for publishing her dreck.

Renkl and the Times concede that “Twisters,” which appears to be the non-superhero hit that Hollywood desperately needs, “ is a humdinger of a summer blockbuster that delivers exactly what theatergoers want in an action film: plenty of explosions, destruction, high-speed chases and heroism, all with a dash of wit and sexual tension thrown in. It is not — and does not aspire to be — high cinematic art.” However, it is, she argues, a missed “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.”

No, it’s really not. A movie people want to see for escape and entertainment isn’t a “golden opportunity” for the writers and producers to bombard them with favored and faddish data related to progressive public policy. The Ethics Alarms standard response to the “Why are you talking/writing/singing about what you want to instead of what I want to” is “Write your own blog, direct your own play, produce your own movie or sing your own song.

“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,” Margaret says, stating as fact what is still a matter of scientific debate. “And they are sticking by that decision amid one of the most active tornado seasons in history. 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.”

Well, that’s a bit of an over-generalization: plenty of films convey thought-provoking messages and still manage to be entertaining while not making audiences feel like they are being brainwashed. Nonetheless, if the director believes that the more enjoyable version of his movie will be one that avoids activism, especially during an election year when a lot of people are sick to death of everything—like, say, just to try a wild hypothetical, even an Olympics opening ceremony—being charged with political controversy, that is a valid artistic choice.

Not to Margaret, though. “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,” she bitches. “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.”

And what fun that would add to the movie!

“It would not have stripped one bit of screaming energy from one single truck-tossing tornado 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,” she says. “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?”

Good point. Make your own damn movie, if you’re so sure it would be a better one. I have my doubts.

Finally, the Times propagandist shows her true colors in the next-to-last last paragraph: “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.”

No, you totalitarian, partisan hack, the Supreme Court is determine to quash unconstitutional abuses of power by the President and his agencies designed to cripple business and industry while inflicting hardship on the populace without due process of law as well as without any substantial evidence that it will prevent a single tornado.

Ms. Renkl’s screed earns her a “Jacques Brel Award,” which, as the Ethics Alarms glossary explains, is a special Ethics Alarms designation bestowed on those who evoke the late, great French troubadour’s observation, “If you leave it up to them, they’ll crochet the world the color of goose shit.” The prosaic version is that people like Renkle want to leach all the fun and joy out of life by weaponizing fear, guilt, paranoia and peer pressure.

I haven’t been to a movie theater in years, but I’m going to make a point of seeing “Twisters” just to metaphorically stick it to Margeret Renkl.

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Pointer: Other Bill