“Hey Barbara!” Wanna go see a movie tonight?”
“Sure! What do you want to see?”
“The Day After Tomorrow.”
“Oh, I thought you wanted to go tonight.”
"I do"
“OK, then, What do you want to see?”
“The Day After Tomorrow.”
“You just said you wanted to go tonight!”
“I do.”
“Then what do you want to see?”
“The Day After Tomorrow.”
“Go to the movies by yourself!”
OK, that really didn’t happen. But it could have. Barbara did end up accompanying me to see the film, and she ended up enjoying it as much as I did. Because when you get down to brass tacks, The Day After Tomorrow is two hours of hold onto your seats suspense, with fantastic special effects and a touch of human interest thrown in for good measure.
Writer-director Roland Emmerich seems to have it in for the world, and New York and Los Angeles especially targeted. He smashed the great cities of the world flat in Independence Day. He unleashed a giant lizard on Manhattan in Godzilla. This time around, he hits LA with tornadoes and New York with a tidal wave. Can somebody get this guy into therapy?
Unlike his previous two end of the world epics, however, The Day After Tomorrow carries something of a moral message about the effects of a runaway Greenhouse effect triggering catastrophic climactic change. In this case, it’s a new ice age. And while much has been made of the fact that the film is great Science Fiction but poor science, it’s important to realize we are altering our planets ecological balance.
Those who scoff at the sudden climactic change featured in The Day After Tomorrow should know this: there are some scientists who feel that, rather than bringing gradual change over centuries, the Earth’s climate could someday reach a “breaking point” similar to the one described in the film, with sudden and unpleasant change. The Pentagon seems to take some stock in this; they’ve devised a contingency plan to deal with it should it occur. Just something to consider as you watch the film.
As our story begins, Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid) is performing scientific experiments in Antarctica when a piece of an ice shelf the size of Rhode Island (why always the size of Rhode Island?) breaks off into the sea. That, unfortunately is just the beginning. Soon, baseball-sized hail is falling on Tokyo, tornadoes are tearing through Los Angeles, and Scotland is hit by the deepest deep-freeze ever recorded by man.
Working with English climatologist Terry Rapson (Ian Holm), Hall is faced with a shocking revelation: a new ice age is descending upon the world. He tries to warn Vice President Becker (Kenneth Welsh) of the dangers, but to no avail. There’s nothing to be done about the coming changes, of course, but Hall is convinced lives can be saved if an evacuation of the United States begins before the super-blizzards move down North America.
As fate would have it, Hall’s son Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal) is in New York just when the deep freeze hits. So, he makes the journey through the howling winds, bitter cold, and monumental snowfalls to save Sam. But can Sam and his companions, forced to burn books in the New York Public Library to keep warm, last long enough for Hall to get there?
The human story is an integral element of The Day After Tomorrow. But it isn’t the big story. The big story is the message the film carries. Like Jeff Goldblum’s environmentally conscious character in Independence Day, Quaid’s Hall is also worried about what humans are doing to the Earth. He drives a gas-sipping hybrid. He rails about our fragile eco-system.
There are other similarities to Independence Day here, too. In the epic proportions of the film, but also on other levels. The relationship between father and son, seen in the latter between Jeff Goldblum and
Judd Hirsch, is here too. In that film, Goldblum had to make his way from New York to Washington, here, Quaid makes the opposite trip.
If you don’t agree with the film’s message, however, you can still enjoy it as a good-old-fashioned disaster epic. The amazing special effects bring the incredible weather events to life with great realism. The tornadoes tearing through LA are breathtaking; the tidal wave hitting New York even more so.
The acting is adequate, with Quaid performing best. Gyllenhaal is surprisingly good, too in his role, though both are fairly emotionally flat throughout the film. Occasional sprinkles of humor lighten the action now and then, but they’re few and far between. Best of all is an ironic scene of a mass illegal immigration of Americans into Mexico.
Are the events portrayed in The Day After Tomorrow likely? Probably not. But the message is still important, and the film highly entertaining. It’s worth seeing on the big screen, if only for the fantastic effects. But you’d best hurry and see it today. Because you just never know what the day after tomorrow might bring.
With THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW director Roland Emmerich INDEPENDENCE DAY GODZILLA trades evil aliens and radioactive lizards in for some seriously bad we...More at Family Video
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