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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
In this inane special-effects vehicle, Americans desperately try to cross into Mexico to escape a frozen death. Audiences will do the same.
May 28, 2004 | In "The Day After Tomorrow," New York City is besieged first by torrential rains, then by a massive tidal wave and finally by temperatures so cold that humans die instantly upon exposure. This means, of course, that most of the city's denizens die. Welcome to summer blockbuster season.
I suppose that, for some, there's pleasure to be had in seeing New York wrecked by Mother Nature (as opposed to terrorists), particularly in a movie that earnestly believes it's adding something to the global-warming debate. But "The Day After Tomorrow," Roland Emmerich's cautionary entertainment about massive climactic shifts that trigger a new Ice Age practically overnight, is a hollow colossus. Some of its special effects are impressive for their scale, if nothing else: There's one particularly poetic shot of the Statue of Liberty draped in snow to her waist, her crown and torch graced with giant icicles.
But while I'm not immune to the charms of Godzilla trampling his way through Tokyo, I'm not really sure I get the appeal of modern movies in which cities are destroyed for fun. I'm not just talking about New York. In "The Day After Tomorrow," bad weather hits just about everybody: In Los Angeles, hurricane winds pick off the letters of the Hollywood sign one by one, whisking them off to Oz before our very eyes; in Tokyo, hailstones the size of grapefruit clonk innocent citizens on the head, killing them instantly (in one instance, a wife's voice crackles frantically through a cellphone as her recently clonked husband lies dead in the street). And while "The Day After Tomorrow" makes much of the destruction of poor New York, and at least nods to the end of civilization as we know it in the upper United States (the Southern states, while subjected to some lousy weather, are left relatively unscathed), it never even mentions Canada: Presumably it's just a bunch of snow and pine trees and lumberjacks up there anyway, so who really cares?
Of course, it's pointless to take anything in "The Day After Tomorrow" too seriously. At the same time, though, it's obvious that Emmerich (who also co-wrote the script, with Jeffrey Nachmanoff) believes he's giving us escapism with a conscience. The movie's plot, such as it is, exists solely as an anchor for the special effects: Dennis Quaid is Jack Hall, a Washington, D.C., climatologist who has long been trying to warn the world's leaders -- particularly the vice president of the United States -- of the dangers of global warming. What he doesn't realize is that a global "superstorm," triggered by bad atmospheric stuff, is about to hit; within days -- not, as he had earlier predicted, hundreds of years -- much of the Northern Hemisphere will be covered by a giant ice cap.
"The Day After Tomorrow"
Directed by Roland Emmerich
Starring Dennis Quaid, Jake Gyllenhaal, Sela Ward
That's bad news, particularly since Hall's son, Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal), has just headed north to Manhattan for a high-school academic competition. He and his friends, including the blinking, doe-eyed Laura (Emmy Rossum), are not only trapped by the bad weather; it could, as Hall warns his son in one rushed, last-minute phone conversation, kill them.
