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| Day After Tomorrow, The |
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  (7/10)
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Runtime: 124 |
| Public Rating: 7.66 (440 votes) |
Director: Roland Emmerich |
MPAA Rating:  |
| Genre: sci-fi, fantasy, adventure |
Year: 2004 |
| Writer(s): Written by Roland Emmerich (story), Roland Emmerich &Jeffrey Nachmanoff (screenplay), suggested in part by the book The Coming Global Superstorm by Art Bell and Whitley Strieber. |
| Distributor: 20th Century Fox/ Lion's Gate |
| Reviewed by: Avril Carruthers |
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Produced by Mark Gordon and Roland Emmerich.
Starring Dennis Quaid, Jake Gyllenhaal, Emmy Rossum, Dash Mihok, Sela Ward, Arjay Smith, Janet Tokada, Ian Holm.
Roland Emmerich is a director who enjoys writing and/or directing epic action adventures. Among his creations are Universal Soldier, The Patriot, Godzilla, and Independence Day. The Day After Tomorrow is a disaster movie which, unlike ID4, has more than a possibility of actually happening to us. It’s a cautionary tale taking the problems of greenhouse gas emissions and global warming to their predicted consequences in an Ice Age which affects North America and Northern Europe in devastating fashion. Various experts have suggested – as does the film’s paleo-climatologist Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid) – that such a catastrophe will probably happen in a hundred years, or a thousand. For cinematic purposes the film makes the disaster happen far faster and sooner than any predictions indicate, and Emmerich creates a cataclysmic global come-uppance which freezes the offending northern hemisphere quicker than Medusa.
Professor Jack Hall has a theory based on a reconstruction of the last global ice age 10,000 years ago, that melting polar ice caps affected the North Atlantic current, causing rapid climatic change, violent and unusual weather patterns and an ice age, which mankind nevertheless managed to survive somehow. Naturally his theories are given no credence by the sceptical Vice President of the United States at the UN Conference on Global Warming in New Delhi. The silly fool should have considered the unusual portent of the snow falling on the greenie protesters outside the conference.
Various alarming meteorological malefactions are then visited on hapless communities from Los Angeles to Florida. Helicopter fuel lines freeze in mid air in Scotland followed swiftly by the snap freezing of the unfortunate pilot crawling out of the crash. A flying billboard in LA carries away a news anchorman standing unwisely in the path of a tornado. Hail stones the size of small boulders smash the unprotected heads of Tokyo pedestrians. Cars hurtle chaotically through the air. Buildings black out and a janitor opens a corridor door onto open space where the rest of the building used to be. Nature is definitely hitting back and kicking ass.
In the meantime, the characters we are supposed to care about, Jack and his doctor wife Lucy (Sela Ward) send their 17-year-old son Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal) off on a School Science Decathlon in New York City. His plane barely makes it, and Jack, helped by data supplied by a sympathetic colleague in a weather station in Scotland, Professor Terry Rapson (Ian Holm), presents more compelling evidence to the President that a superstorm will hit the northern hemisphere, centring on New York. Despite this, Jack vows to rescue his son in an attempt to make up for all the time spent away from him in polar ice stations while Sam was growing up. Just as well he has all the polar gear he needs to snow-shoe most of the way from the US Embassy in Mexico to the Manhattan Public Library where Sam is holed up with a few other survivors, burning books to stay alive. It must be significant that they do this – I would have burned the furniture.
From the opening of the film where the melting of the polar icecaps dramatically causes the shearing off of a sizable chunk of the Antarctic Ice Shelf right down the middle of Jack’s ice core drilling operation to the, ah, chilling end, the action is tensely apocalyptic. It’s also more than a little predictable. As well, the characters are too thin to gain much sympathy, with a couple of exceptions.
To have an impact across the board, a disaster movie needs to show human reactions at their basest as well as at their best. Consider James Cameron’s Titanic, where selfishness and cowardice, bravery and love, and jealousy and hate were put into perspective alongside survival. One flaw of this movie is that too many of the characters are shown as noble, unselfish and brave. We also can be certain from the start that much as the director has given Nature a punishing hand to deal, he will not do the same to his main characters.
Only the poignant depth and presence of Ian Holm’s Terry, along with his doomed British team, can let us really experience what that situation would be like. Dennis Quaid is given little opportunity to show us much more than a generic absent-father/lone-Voice-in-the-Wilderness-scientist, although he does look cold. Jake Gyllenhaal, without the depth he can normally bring to the quirky characters he has played, often seems to be acting in a fog, despite the (all too few, and far too innocent) intense moments with the fresh-faced and lovely Laura (Emmy Rossum). The homeless guy with the dog (whose name I cannot find out) is given some wonderful humorous moments. Jack’s sidekick Jason (Dash Mihok) brings some personality to the role, but it is largely subservient to the real stars of the film – the special effects, the cinematography and the editing.
These are, without exception, spectacularly mind-blowing: the Statue of Liberty up to her armpits in a tidal wave, Manhattan flooded, a ghostly Russian tanker nosing down Wall St., cosmonauts in an orbiting space station who cannot land, looking down, post-storm, on the clearest air they have ever seen around the Earth. The special effects are reason alone to see the film. Will they – or the directorial irony which has the world’s most powerful nation seeking refugee status in Mexico - change the minds of the powers that be about the global need to change to sustainable, alternative technology? I doubt it.
© Avril Carruthers, 20th May 2004
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