Problems with the Opening Scene
God, there are sooo many things messed up about the part in 1969, when Jo was a little girl.
My second biggest complaint in this scene, is WHY IS THE STORM CELLAR SO FRICKIN' FAR FROM THE HOUSE???!!!!!!!!!! NOBODY BUILDS SOMETHING THAT ESSENTIAL SO FAR FROM THEIR HOME!!!!!! That storm cellar had to have been at least 30 feet away from the house. Was their home built by idiots or something?! When you have a tornado bearing down on your home, every second counts when it comes to getting to safety, trust me.
Even in the 1800s, most storm cellars were built right under the house, though it was not always accessible from within the house like it is today. If you look at the twister scene in "Wizard of Oz," old storm cellars in Tornado Alley were built mostly for storage, and you could get to them through a pair of doors on the side of the house.
My biggest complaint was the construction of the storm door (and both my parents complained about this in the theaters when we saw it in '96). Who the hell uses TWO ITTY BITTY LITTLE PINS to bolt a storm shelter door shut????!!!!! You really think a twister of any size (never mind the F-5 in the scene) isn't gonna be strong enough to suck that door up?!!! My mom lived in the Midwest in the 50s, and she said even back then, most storm doors had (and are still made with) a big, heavy, flat metal bolt that slides into the wall when the lock is engaged. Some storm doors have two. It was particularly stupid that this guy not only thinks a shittily-constructed storm door is gonna keep him and his family safe, but he actually assumes his puny human muscles are gonna have any chance at holding that door shut against 200+ mph winds. What happened was very predictable; him getting sucked up by the storm.
The last thing that doesn't make sense is, that storm cellar was very shallow, and that tornado was almost on top of them when it sucked Jo's dad away. Why is it that she and her mom didn't get sucked away too? (And no, I'm not buying the whale mom jokes. Even fat people can get sucked up by a twister).
The rest of the movie was better-written than that.
Mom also pointed out that many homes in modern Oklahoma don't have storm cellars because the soil is either too hard from the bedrock being too close to the surface (only way to build basements in soil like that is with dynamite) or the water table is so high that such a home would need twice as many sump pumps to keep from flooding every time it rained, causing many houses in that state that do have basements to be very expensive compared to those that don't. Most people these days buy and install what are called "Storm Rooms," which are great at protecting people from flying debris in a tornado.