As I entered the second week of quarantine for flu-like symptoms that began last week, I caught a gem Saturday night. A small supercell developed to southwest of Clarksville and traveled through Fort Campbell, putting on an amazing lighting show that I watched from my balcony. After seeing such a spectacle, I thought about 1996 classic Twister. Out of many disaster flicks I watched, few were memorable for different reasons. Here are my top 3 picks.
Twister
That is still my favorite disaster film, and it was one of few things that launched me into the world of severe weather and tornadoes in my childhood. I even dreamed of becoming a storm chaser when I was pretty young. Years later, I still cherish this classic.
Category 6: Day of Destruction
Okay, I’m bit ashamed of my younger self for wanting to see tornadoes fling cows and destroy skyscrapers. I watched this and its sequel, Category 7: The End of the World, multiple times to pass time during boring summers and sometimes on nights when I did not have any homework in my middle and early high school years. What a better way to waste a summer day than watching abomination of hybrid storms wrecking skyscrapers?
2012
I first saw this one when I was 12, and I watched that movie so many times, especially in the summer of 2010. That was a very boring summer, and there was not much I could do other than watch TV and play with a cat. Years later, I started to realize how ridiculous the movie was. It was so awful in terms of scientific accuracy that it made Twister and Category 6 look like nature documentaries. The only thing that is remotely accurate in the film in my opinion is the Yellowstone eruption scene only because there is a remote possibly of it actually happening*. Nowadays, I usually watch scenes from 2012 for laughs.
*USGS pins probability of a major eruption from Yellowstone Caldera happening in a given year as 1 in 730,000
**Featured image is scene of tornadoes wrecking… Los Angles of anywhere from The Day After Tomorrow, 2004 disaster flick that I have seen before.
I am a trained spotter and weather enthusiast who spent years enjoying learning about weather. I provide my thoughts and commentaries, sometimes with light humor.
