I've always been a weather nerd, fascinated to the point of fixation on any kind of severe weather, but particularly thunderstorms and tornadoes. Despite giving up my lifelong dream of studying meteorology (after the weatherman of my local NBC affiliate shot himself on-air in the middle of a very long drought – though a much longer drought, it was later discovered, of the weatherman getting any sex), I have maintained more than a passing interest in the subject, and have been caught on more than one occasion pleasuring myself in front of The Weather Channel. So when I saw the trailers for The Day After Tomorrow, I was had at hello. It didn't hurt that DAT was helmed by Roland Emmerich, the man responsible for Independence Day, one of the biggest, loudest, and most ridiculous movies ever made (and one I love for all those reasons). In The Day After Tomorrow, global warming has melted the polar icecaps to such a degree that the temperature of the world's oceans has dropped to a critical level. In turn, the ocean currents that control the planet's weather have been upset, causing an imbalance that can only be corrected by a massive global "superstorm." The movie is loosely based on a book called The Coming Global Superstorm, which was written by Art Bell and Whitley Strieber. Now, Bell and Strieber are not exactly known for being grounded in reality, so that doesn't help the film's credibility as a scientific document. My attitude on this topic remains as it has always been: FUCK IT. IT'S A MOVIE. The first act deals with prominent climatologist Dennis Quaid discovering that the world's climate is going to shift dramatically because of global warming. He tries to convince his bosses, the government, and anyone who will listen that something bad is going to happen, but per the 1979 Disaster Movie Conventions & Clichés Accord, no one will listen. The middle (and most satisfying) segment is the "Superstorm" part. We get snow in India, then hail the size of softballs in Japan, then a herd of tornadoes destroying Los Angeles, fifteen feet of snow in England, and a massive tsunami flooding New York City halfway up the skyline. The third portion is probably the most ridiculous part, where Dennis Quaid hikes like 300 miles across the newly frozen tundra that now makes up the northern half of the United States to get to New York to save his son, which, of course, he does, in the nick of time. Yes, yes, yes, I hear you. It's profoundly stupid and could never happen for about ten million reasons. But remember the mantra: FUCK IT. IT'S A MOVIE. I don't think Emmerich was too concerned about making a scientifically accurate film, he just needed a convenient reason to make a movie about destroying most of the Northern hemisphere, just like in Independence Day, and he does so with loads of CGI, and it's just a blast to watch. Unlike Independence Day, DAT actually carries some emotional weight, and features some unsettling moments that you could actually visualize happening. A flying saucer the size of a city? Unsettling in theory, but so unlikely as to diminish the effect. A endless line of millions of birds flying south over New York City while fleeing the coming storm? Much more plausible, and therefore, much more disturbing. Sometimes, the pure spectacle of a film is alone worth the price of admission. You turn your brain off, you eat your Twizzlers®, and you escape into fantasyland for a little while. The Day After Tomorrow is, in this respect, Twizzleriffic®. Its flaws are many and preposterous, but irrelevant. Plus, you can't fault a big-budget Hollywood movie that features a familiar "Law & Order" character actor as the Vice President!
Review by –SECOND OPINION– The end credits of The Day After Tomorrow state that the film was "Suggested By" the book The Coming Global Superstorm by Art Bell and Whitley Strieber. As a devoted Art Bell fanatic, and one generally confused by Whitley Strieber (who in a recent internet radio show talked openly of having alien prods rammed in his anus causing a series of orgasms, as if that's a bad thing), I was well familiar with their book and their global superstorm. I regaled friends with tales of how Buoy 13 in the Georges Banks would show a thirteen degree drop, which climatologists would at first attribute to an error … but then other buoys would show the same temperature drop. It could only mean one thing: the recent influx of freshwater from the melting polar ice caps had interrupted the flow of the Gulf Stream, which brings warm water to the Northern Hemisphere. This would set into motion a series of spectacular storms that would devastate civilization as we know it, culminating in a single united storm that would practically cover the entire globe, and lead ultimately to an ice sheet covering most of America and Europe. Hence the book's title. What I failed to realize in my hypothesizing and fear-mongering, is how fucking awesome it would be to watch the devastation. And that's where the film comes in. As a disaster movie, DAT is second to none. Anything cool that can happen to a major city or a crowd of people does – hail storms crush beady-eyed Japanese; tornadoes suck sleazy Angelenos into the sky; greedy New Yorkers drown in their own filth; and drunken Irishmen freeze solid in seconds (finally answering the age-old question of whether an inhuman blood-alcohol level acts as an anti-freeze). To a large degree, the filmmakers revel in the destruction, which is exactly the kind of bloodletting audiences everywhere enjoy. Unfortunately, they also attempt to craft a human ensemble drama amid the giant waves and flash-freezes. Or rather, they pretend to craft a drama, which plays much more like like a sarcastic comedy. It was really hard to tell whether they were trying to be comic or serious, but regardless, it was a pretty fucking funny movie. With every new up-tick in danger, the dialogue became more overheated, and the audience laughed harder. Having read the script, which I greatly enjoyed, I was surprised to see how poorly the talking parts came across, because on the page it somehow seemed to work. But if Emmerich was trying to make a case against global warming, he probably set the cause back to the pre-acid rain early 80s when Nancy Reagan spearheaded the "Pollution Illusion" campaign, for which Menudo recorded the ill-conceived R&B love song, "Smokin' and Jokin' and Jivin'." If dialogue is just a part of the mystery, the acting in this film is the equivalent of the candlestick in the parlor – by which I mean, the acting is so across-the-board awful that it effectively murders the Professor Plum of quality. Dennis Quaid, as the lead climatologist who keeps trying to shake some sense into the bureaucrats who dismiss him as a lunatic, is suspiciously – deeply suspiciously – bad. He's by no means a great actor to begin with, but most of the time he at least puts in a little effort. In DAT, Quaid is either so coked-up or so apathetic that he seems somehow less a movie star than the lead in a junior high musical desperately trying to remember his next line and not get a boner in the kissing scene. The other actors, including Jake Gyllenhaal and Sela Ward (apparently on weekend furlough from Lifetime), spout their lines with all the conviction of a porn star at an AIDS clinic – they'd clearly rather be anywhere else, but they've got to give a little blood or the Nissan Z gets repossessed. Ian Holm is the only actor who comes out relatively unscathed, though I couldn't help but wonder how Bilbo had ended up in Northern Ireland during a snowstorm. And why didn't he just call upon Gandalf to reverse the catastrophes? Other than a pathetic sequence involving painful CG wolves, the only real problem I had with the film is that super gay "Suggested By" credit. Clearly a case of the producers pussying out on paying the authors their fair share. As a result, I'd like to "suggest" the following: a "coming global superstorm" of my fists, in their faces. Now that's a path of destruction America can get behind!
Review by Crimedog – THIRD OPINION– For awhile it seemed like the World Trade Center contretemps would forever put the kibosh on big disaster movies, but apparently we've all "healed" enough that it's once again acceptable fun to watch horrifying calamities befalling our national landmarks. The Day After Tomorrow, unfortunately, serves up too little worldwide disaster and too much screenwriting disaster, though the cool parts (mainly, L.A. and New York being, respectively, ripped to shreds and frozen over) are cool enough to justify sitting through the ineptly contrived plot developments and horrible acting. I went in simply wanting to see big cities destroyed, and it delivered that nicely. I could have used more big cities being destroyed, especially given that the film is padded with scenes designed to help you connect emotionally with the "real human drama" of a global catastrophe. Fuck that shit, though. I'm nothing less than insulted when a disaster movie tries to make me care about a single 6-year-old cancer patient when it is otherwise killing off thousands of people per second. After L.A. gets razed, things get increasingly non-believable, to the point where I wished they had just dispensed with the pretense of realism and, like, had Dennis Quaid saddle up on a Tauntaun, and/or Jake Gyllenhaal suddenly reveal devastating telekinetic powers or time-traveling abilities with which he could save the day.
Review by La Fée – FOURTH OPINION– Upon watching a bootleg copy of The Day After Tomorrow during a slow period at the office, I can honestly say that the scene where the guy in the 14th row gets up to take a piss is better than anything that Roland Emmerich put into the actual film. Granted, it's an offense to most beverages in my home to even place them atop one of his DVDs, and expectations are super-low from the man responsible for the most menacing, unstoppable aliens ever to be easily killed because of Jeff Goldblum inexplicably shooting a Pepsi can (?). Predictably, Dennis Quaid turns in another miserable, mundane performance as the guy who tries to stop the insantity, only to have all hell break loose despite his efforts. Of course, the notion of global survival depending on the word of one "paleo-climatologist" is already specious enough; unfortunately the government didn't have the good sense to inject him into Martin Short's body this time. Quaid offers the same eight faces he gave us in cinematic triumphs like Frequency and D.O.A.; his dopey son Jake Gyllenhaal aims for a piece of Tobey Maguire's action-star action, though he was more believable contending with psychotic rabbits. There were probably some good actors in the movie, but under Emmerich's miserable direction, everyone is reduced to shouting exposition and/or providing "symbolic" meaning. The script had more holes than Charlie Brown's Halloween costume, and last half-hour of the film has all the excitement of an episode of Wall Street Week (even WITH Louis Rukeyser). Despite the cataclysmic special effects, the overall effect is merely "Twister on crystal meth," utilizing millions of studio dollars for the sole purpose of ripping off a gullible audience. As far as I'm concerned, Irwin Allen died in 1991, and took this genre with him.
Review by Ted Nougat |