The preceding movie trailer is for the 1996 Steven Spielberg disaster thriller, Twister. The movie focuses around a team of Oklahoma meteorologists, led by Dr. Jo Harding (played by Helen Hunt) who are attempting to deploy an instrument named "Dorothy" into a tornado in hopes of designing a more advanced tornado warning system. When Dr. Bill Harding (Bill Paxton), the brains behind the Dorothy Project and former member of the team (and Jo's ex-husband) shows up to finalize the two's divorce, he sees the finalized Project, and only after encountering a rival storm-chasing team with a similar device headed by Dr. Jonas Miller (Cary Elwes), he decides to come back to the team to help them stake their claim to the first successful deployment of the Dorothy Project. The movie does a fine job of creating a real and not overly "Apocalyptic" feeling of a natural disaster, giving the viewers the thought, "Maybe this could happen to me!"
The movie, although simple in plot, touches heavily on a very realistic yet dire scenario: What were to happen if a tornado outbreak of such an epic magnitude were to strike a developed area? What sort of measures are being taken to prevent a large number of casualties in real life? Is a real-life "Dorothy Project" in place?
In the movie, Dr. Harding explains that the average time between a Tornado Warning and the arrival of the tornado is approximately three minutes, and that theoretically, with Dorothy's new information, the new system could increase the warning time five-fold. This is a staggering statistic, and although this story is purely fictional, steps must be taken in that direction in order to effectively increase warning time.
A real-life example of this worst-case scenario can be taken from the "Super Outbreak" of April 3-4, 1974. On the 4th, at approximately 3:30 pm, an F5 tornado leveled the city of Xenia, Ohio, and caused about 35 deaths. One can wonder if a more advanced warning system could have prevented those deaths. That can't be proven, however, until Dr. Bill Harding's "Dorothy Project" can become a reality.
Good example of a primary source, Corey. If you were thinking about using this for your primary source analysis, think specifically about *how* disaster is being represented in the movie and how it works/does not work for you as an audience member.
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