Rated PG-13

Recently I viewed this film for the first time. I had seen the previews on television and thought it would be a fairly decent movie but in reality it was just ok. The acting was good and the plot was tight but the facts used in making the film were stretched by any reach of the imagination to the point of unbelievable.

The truth is, we are burning way too many fossil fuels and polluting the atmosphere to a very dangerous point and something needs to be done about it and done quickly. The process of fixing what is broken will take years to accomplish but the sooner we start the sooner the Earth can begin the healing process. This film drives that point to a fault by showing the Earth rapidly and violently resolving the issue for itself. On a believability scale of 1-10 I would give this movie a 3 only because the special effects do make it seem somewhat realistic.


The story in short
In this film climatologist Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid) discovers that the polar caps are melting at a fast rate causing the desalinization of the oceans. This disrupts the north Atlantic current and causes several dominoes to fall in its wake. Three massive storm cells accumulate over Scotland, Siberia and Canada forming the largest over-land storms ever recorded in over ten thousand years. The eyes of these storms are pulling super-cooled air from the upper troposphere down to ground level so fast that the air can not warm up and anything caught on the ground in these eyes will be frozen solid in seconds. It is very intriguing but not very believable. This paves the way for a new Ice Age but it takes place over the course of 7-10 days instead of hundreds or thousands of years.

Jack’s son Sam Hall (Jake Gyllenhaal) is stuck in the public library in New York during the onset of the storm and can not get out of the city. Jack decides to go get him and sets out to New York from Washington, D.C. on a trip through the worst blizzard in recorded history.

Acting
The acting in this film was decent. Dennis Quaid did a good job of playing the determined father/scientist figure and Jake Gyllenhaal was a great choice for the survivor/leader figure for the small group stuck in New York. I also think that Fox did a great job of making the news casts seem as believable as possible given the story and impossible scenario.

Special Effects
The special effects and computer imagery used in this film were nothing short of genius. In one scene the ocean swells to more than sixty feet over it’s normal level and hurls itself at New York with all its might. The statue of liberty is barely heads above water and the wave hits New York pushing everything in its path flooding the entire city.

Later in the film, a ship (a Russian oil tanker) glides down the street in front of the public library and only stops because it runs aground on a bus crushing it beneath the tremendous weight of the tanker.

The computer generated graphics were astounding with breath taking footage of the Earth enveloped in swirling cloud cover as seen from the space station in orbit. It is also no small feat to create the illusion of more than six F-6 class tornados churning their way through Los Angeles.

Imagine the Capitol Records building dwarfed by an F-6 tornado and busses being launched through the streets of Los Angeles. This movie shows that and with the help of Fox News, it is presented as fairly believable. I just simply can’t imagine a series of tornados hitting Los Angeles in my life time. I would be more likely to believe that the San Adreas fault were to break and make some beach front property in Arizona before believing that.


DVD Special Features
The DVD I bought includes these special features on the disc.

* Full-length audio commentary by Director/Co-writer Roland Emmerich and producer Mark Gordon

* Full-length audio commentary by Co-writer Jeffery Nachmanoff, Director of Photography Ueli Steiger, Editor David Brenner and Production Designer Barry Chusid

* “Audio Anatomy” Interactive sound demo

* Deleted Scenes

* DVD-ROM includes over an hour of exclusive “Making of” footage


Entertainment value

I liked the movie and it was fun to watch. The overall entertainment value saved the movie for me. I am a science fiction buff but I like my science fiction to have an air of believability to it and this movie falls a little short of the mark for me in that respect. I have watched it twice since I purchased it and both times I felt a little let down by the story. The special effects and decent acting made it entertaining enough to watch again though.


Conclusion

If you like disaster movies or epic event movies, you will probably like this one. If you are like me and like to be able to believe what you are watching “could possibly happen sometime” you may not enjoy it as much. I have a bad habit of picking apart movies when I watch them anyway so I am very critical of stories that don’t hold up to scrutiny.

I hope this helps you decide if you want to see “The Day After Tomorrow”.

Thanks for reading,
Gr8ful :-)


Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Good for a Rainy Day
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older