The calm before. The first four shots of Jan de Bont’s Twister (1996) set an ominous tone. Empty landscapes in rural America, dwarfed by the sky above, darkness closing in. A gentle evening punctuated by the chirps of crickets. The fading remnants of the day’s sunlight slowly smothered by clouds. There are no people in sight, just their creations: a small farm and a pumpjack, a truss bridge across a river, a barbed-wire fence; each designed to give man some kind of hold over nature: to farm it, to traverse it, to segment it. And then, finally, a shot of the cloud-filled sky above a distant row of trees. Uncontrollable, unpredictable, unknowable. A constant, looming presence, beautiful and terrifying in equal measure. And then a crash of lightning tips the scales. Man has conquered the land and the threat now comes from above. The wind starts howling and the calm is over.