Leave it to catastrophe guru Roland Emmerich to kick off the summer movie season with the ridiculously absurd, but highly entertaining, natural disaster escapade, The Day After Tomorrow. The film so often gets caught up in its own ludicrousness that I found myself quietly laughing at the events transpiring on screen. No matter, what is lacks in credible characters, savvy dialogue, and logic, it makes up for with stunning special effects and a thoroughly machine gun like pace. If you can suspend disbelief for all of one hour and twenty-nine minutes, then you'll find plenty to enjoy about this titanic-sized popcorn adventure.
Paleoclimatologist Adrian Hall (Dennis Quaid) and his team notice that something unusual is happening with the weather when a Grand Canyon-like fissure splits open in the middle of the Antarctic. This leads to a head-scratching sequence where Hall heroically jumps across the crevice to save his ice core samples, leaving the audience laughing in his wake at the sheer stupidity of his actions. Pretty soon the weather starts launching brick-sized hail over Tokyo and a monsoon of continuous rain in New York and Washington, D.C. Hall believes these storms are the result of changes in the Ocean temperatures as a result of years of global warming. Further study reveals that the Earth is headed for its first Ice Age in over 10, 000 years. Hall immediately makes a presentation to the U.S. Vice-President and other high-ranking officials, who promptly dismiss his theories as insane and totally unrealistic. They tell him that he's out of his mind, and evacuating the major northern cities is out of the question. After all, politicians always make sound decisions, right?
Anyway, Hall's estranged son Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal) is in New York for a scholastic competition when the real storm strikes. What follows is a spectacular sequence where the Big Apple is absolutely leveled by a colossal tidal wave. We watch as cars, buses, and even people are annihilated by a wall of water, forcing Sam and his friends to take shelter in the Public Library. The news gets worse when Hall learns that a storm cold enough to freeze fuel lines (which occurs at -152 degrees F) is heading for New York. Hall, for reasons that defy all logic and common sense, sets out into the blizzard to rescue his son.
Now, if you're expecting believable character decisions or an even remotely sensible plot, you've come to the wrong movie. These are the types of people who belong in a horror movie, where brainless characters are the norm. Seriously, I felt like smacking myself in the head so many times I lost count by the end of the film. Consider a scene where Sam's love interest Laura (Emmy Possum) helps a woman and her children out of a flooding taxi cab, and even with a massive tidal wave approaching, she inexplicably goes back for her passport ? You gotta be kidding me. Then there’s the little matter of why Hall and his team embark on an unfeasible rescue mission in the first place. What does he hope to accomplish by doing this? The only explanation we’re given is that, because Hall has been somewhat of a lousy father over the years, he vowed to protect his son, so this is what he must do. To quote Quaid’s character, as he stares sternly into the camera, “This is one promise I plan on keeping”. At least half the audience in the theatre cracked up from this line.
Granted, the people who go to see these kinds of movies don’t usually care about how corny the dialogue is (and trust me, it’s a hoot) or the ineptitude shown by the characters in desperate situations. More importantly, they come for special effects, and stay for the action. Emmerich delivers handsomely on both fronts.
Perhaps the most formidable sequence is where multiple tornadoes (F-5’s, if you’ve ever seen Twister ) ravage downtown Los Angeles. Emmerich puts the entire 125 million dollar budget to good use, and it’s fair to say that a sizeable chunk of it has been spent on the Computer Generated Images (CGI). It was actually quite horrifying to watch the flying debris turn ordinary people into human pancakes. Such is the case when a loud-mouthed reporter is picked off by a traffic sign, in a very surprising shot that left me speechless. The dark, angry sky and the enormous tornadoes all look startlingly authentic and menacing. The other effects, like the frozen Lady Liberty from the movie’s poster, have a very realistic, and more importantly, very convincing appearance. Guess all that money was well spent.
I mentioned that the movie has a brisk pace, which certainly helps keep the audience glued to screen, but also doesn’t allow them time to analyze much of the film’s cheesy plot. It’s a good thing too, because otherwise I’d be poking holes in the plot until the next Ice Age. I also find it refreshing to see movies, such as this one, that don’t drag on forever, leaving many members of the audience with permanently numb posteriors from six hour epics like the recent marathon, Troy. Emmerich’s directing is usually flashy and over-the-top, with grand sweeping shots of the immense destruction to the cities, but I give him credit for keeping things moving. Accomplishing all of this in under ninety minutes is something more Hollywood directors should consider doing.
The acting is about par for the course for this kind of movie. Dennis Quaid is the stereotypical father who’s always late to pick up his kid, and who is constantly wrapped up in his work, forcing his family to lash out. Still, Quaid seems very at ease in the part of Hall, and was a good casting choice by the producers. Gyllenhaal does what is required of him in playing the quiet, courageous hero. What I found amusing was that the filmmakers tried to pass him off as a seventeen-year-old high school student, when he clearly looks much older (he’s in his early twenties if I recall correctly). All the other people inhabiting this movie are one-dimensional, cardboard cut outs, and who are virtually all stock characters, whether it’s the dismissive Vice-President or the funny homeless man. There’s rarely a moment where you don’t believe they are merely actors running around on a very expensive movie set, but they play their respective parts adequately enough so that it’s not a big issue.
As a whole, The Day After Tomorrow has its fair share of eye-rolling character decisions, and plot holes big enough for a blue whale to fit through, but it remains fun and entertaining until the final credits roll. The characters may not be sharp as a tack, but the impressive visuals and frantic pacing more than make up for these minor quibbles. Emmerich is no stranger to large-scale disaster flicks (he helmed the engaging but silly Independence Day and the dreadful Godzilla ), and he shows he knows exactly what he’s doing here. So, if you like your films with plenty of destruction and dazzling special effects, then The Day After Tomorrow is the summer movie to see.
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