The
Day After Tomorrow
Rating:
***/*****, or 7/10
Probably
Roland Emmerich's most typical disaster movie, delivering grandiose
spectacle as catastrophe strikes and actors attempt to survive the
many pixels the visual FX departments throw at them accordingly.
Joining on the doomsday bandwagon of both scientists and laymen
alike, Emmerich depicts the coming of a new ice age due to mankind's
arrogant tampering with the planet's environment. Caused by global
warming, ocean currents change and a series of super storms evolve,
hitting the northern hemisphere hard, resulting in giant tornadoes
levelling Los Angeles and tsunamis engulfing New York City. Things
get even worse when temperatures drop rapidly and the latter town
freezes over completely, leaving a boy (Jake Gyllenhaal) and his
friends trapped in the city library, with his father (Dennis Quaid)
setting out on a desperate trek across the frozen wasteland to come
and save him. Though the prospects of global warming (or global
meltdown for that matter) aren't particularly attractive in real life
either, Emmerich goes all-out without really bothering with the laws
of nature for realism's sake. The movie is therefore much maligned
amongst the scientific community for its preposterous display of
dramatic natural effects supposedly caused by global warming, but the
message stands that we had better try to avoid the Earth cooling down
or warming up for our own health anyway. Like any disaster movie, the
true star of the film is the disaster itself which makes for a highly
entertaining watch, while the human drama in-between moments of
thrilling calamities is less compelling, at times even obnoxious for
getting into the way of the action. Most spectacular is the flooding
of New York, despite the overly digital quality of the piece. After
that, the big freeze and a wolf attack upon the protagonists provide
some more thrills but the best bits have come and gone, though all
too brief moments of satire, like Americans crossing their southern
border to get into Mexico illegally, generate a good laugh
occasionally. Emmerich would find even more stuff to demolish in his
disaster flick to-end-all disaster flicks 2012, as the fate of
whole mankind and indeed the entire world lies in the balance: after
all, the southern hemisphere got off too lightly in this film.
Starring:
Jake Gyllenhaal, Dennis Quaid, Emmy Rossum
Directed
by Roland Emmerich
USA: 20th
Century-Fox, 2004
