The Day After Tomorrow Movie Review

In The Day After Tomorrow the most believable things are the most spectacular and outlandish. Tsunami hits New York? No problem. Tornadoes devastate L.A.? It could happen. Most of the northern hemisphere encased in a sheet of ice in about eight days? Why not?

No, it's when director Roland Emmerich drops his camera to ground level and focuses on people; that's when things get unbelievable. Sadly Tomorrow joins the just-silly league of recent disaster movies such as The Core (which knew it was silly and was a huge guilty pleasure of mine last year) and Armageddon (which had very little idea it was silly), instead of something more resonant--which the trailers seemed to promise--such as Deep Impact.

The nice thing about Emmerich is that he lets you know that he's making a stupid movie right from the get-go. Noted paleo-geologist, Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid) and his two man crew are taking core samples from the Antarctic ice shelf when a giant rift occurs and a huge chasm opens up! Jack and his team barely get away with their lives (it's a movie where people hang by their fingers over a crevasse). Steely-eyed Jack sees the precious core samples on the other side of the divide. Don't jump Jack, it's suicide! But jump Jack must! He leaps! He gathers his core samples canisters. He leaps back! He makes it! He will use those samples to prove their theories about a dangerous trend caused by global warming. He risked his life for those samples, cause Lord knows they couldn't have just drilled a few more.

Jack and his team, including sidekick, Frank Harris (hey, Roland, didn't spend a lot of time thinking up character names, eh?), played by beloved sidekick actor Jay O. Sanders, believe that the global warming is melting the polar ice caps at an alarming rate, and threatening the North Atlantic current. Jack is rebuffed at a conference in New Delhi by a Dick Cheney-looking Vice President named Becker (like the vice president would attend a scientific summit in New Dehli) when he shares his findings and is sent home to Washington D.C. There he faces an even worse scenario when he almost forgets to take his quiz-scholar son, Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal), to the airport. Jack, you see, has been an absent father (ooh, nice one Roland) and Sam, you see, has a knowledge bowl to attend in New York City.

The climate changes continue rapidly and the violence of the storms increase in severity, giving Sam a bumpy ride to the Big Apple. But he has it easy (at least at first). Multiple tornadoes rip Los Angeles apart. Hail the size of grapefruit pelts downtown Tokyo. Sleet in the shape of Godzilla DVDs flatten Roland Emerich's house! (Whoops, sorry, free association there on that last one.) Jack gets a call from a colleague, Terry Rapson (Ian Holm) who imparts the equivalent of "Kiss your asses good-bye" before he himself signs off.

The real threat, you see, is not the odd, enjoyable spectacular super-storm but three gigantic land hurricanes which suck down cold air from the troposphere and freeze-dry everything in their path, creating a new Ice Age. I may be sick but this is a fun idea. They even use a great antecedent analogy, the fact that in the past mammoths had been found frozen whole, with food still undigested in their stomach, to give some ominous hint that this has really all happened once before.

There's nothing else, however, to rival these nifty pseudo-science conceits (and their exposition) in the film. In fact, almost everything else is the very opposite. The dialogue, in particular, is pock-marked with cliché after cliché ("Just tell her how you feel"), and the plot elements don't fare much better.

The worst, though, the absolute killer in this film, is Jack Hall's trek to go find Sam. The planet is in the process of being decimated by three storms. New York has been smashed by a tidal wave (and an ensuing rise in the surrounding sea level about 30 or 40 feet). The snow has started and people are streaming across the border INTO Mexico to get out of their path (the last nice touch in this film). And Jack Hall, in Washington, decides he's going to go get his son who he's talked to on the phone and knows survived the tidal wave.

That tidal wave is nothing compared the collective mental brain wave emanating from the audience at the movie screen that screams, "He's going to do what? The whole world is about to be thrown back to the Pleistocene epoch and he's going out to find his son, who, for all he knows, is fine?"

As if the roads wouldn't be impassable. As if the National Guard and FEMA wouldn't have shut down every thoroughfare in the nation. As if the same ocean swell wouldn't have capsized D.C. as well. And, what's Jack going to do once he gets there? Keep him warm with his latent fatherly love? Show him how to leap crevasses to retrieve ice cores? Worse, the two dopey sidekicks decide to go with Jack. Why? Don't these two have family to look after? Maybe a mother? A sister? A nephew? A second cousin twice removed? ANYbody? Nope. "We're going with you Jack!"

Such allegiance is hard won and certainly not due to Emmerich after this plot point and the movie struggles in this straight jacket until it's over, particularly because he's built a scenario of global disaster that we buy into. He also takes a patronizing undertone through the whole movie, like Charlie Brown's teacher giving an Earth Day lecture. "Wah-wah-wah, wuuuu,"

Once Emmerich loses our confidence he's down and in the prone position, displaying his soft underbelly and the numerous other flaws and nagging problems with the film. Gyllenhaal (and this actually speaks well of the 24-year old) is a little long in the tooth to be playing a naïve high-school senior. The vicious wolves that escape from the zoo, immediately become rabidly aggressive? As if there wouldn't be dead bodies to feed on in a week's time? And how about that scene where Jack Hall and his remaining trusty sidekick (we lose one of them) enter into New York walking on the snow and frozen ice under the Statue of Liberty. THEY WERE COMING FROM PHILLY and they had a GPS with them! How freakin' lost can you get?

Unfortunately, if you're Roland Emmerich, pretty freakin' lost. The Day After Tomorrow is like watching a great storm outside, except you're trapped inside with a bunch of morons.