The Day After Tomorrow Movie Review:


A nagging, disappointing familiarity torments us throughout this apocalyptic disaster movie. And the problem isn't that this is a bad film, but that it reminds us of far better ones. And it proves that corny premises do not need to have appallingly lame dialog and subplots.

Jack Hall (Quaid) is a climatologist who's right about global warming ... except that it's happening right now instead of a century in the future. The world is in the grip of crazily destructive weather, the President and Vice-President (King and Welsh) won't do anything, and Jack's ex-wife (Ward) is worried that their son Sam (Gyllenhaal) is trapped in Manhattan, which of course he is. So Jack gets all heroic and heads to New York with his colleagues (Mihok and Sanders), while Sam and a huddled mass of survivors tries to stay alive as the new ice age dawns.

It's all terribly exciting, and Emmerich clearly loves trashing New York and L.A. on screen (he's done it before). There's enough outrageous end-of-the-world stuff to keep us entertained, and the cast give it everything they've got. Sadly, they get no help from Emmerich, since the script abandons all of them when they need it most; the characters are paper thin, the plotting is lazy and the dialog is painfully earnest. The only joy in watching this film is in the over-the-top disaster effects and a series of extremely witty sight gags.

Otherwise, this was done more profoundly in Deep Impact and with more wit in The Core. Not to mention obvious references to Titanic and AI, plus a general lack of logic (if trapped in a freezing library, which would keep you warmer: burning the books ... or the wooden chairs?). And why do we never see anything outside North America, besides two guys (Lester and Holm) huddled in their Scottish weather station? There are a couple of contrived romantic subplots, a one too many sermons and way more digital sequences that were required. Some of the catastrophes are impressive, but others (like the wolves at the zoo) are just pointless. The whole film feels stingy and vacuous. And it's only barely trashy enough to be fun.

Rich Cline

As tornados tear through Los Angeles, hailstones the size of footballs pummel Tokyo and it snows for the first time in New Deli, climatologists
Jack Hall (Quaid) in Washington D.C. and Professor Terry Rapson (Holm) in Scotland, make an alarming discovery. This isn’t just a series of freak metrological events but the start of something that could change the world forever. For the first time in 10,000 years a super-storm is going to plunge the Earth into a new ice age.

If you want to make a disaster movie based on the effects of extreme climate change due to global warming there is only one man to go to, Roland Emmerich.

The master of disaster brings us his best and biggest event movie yet. This is a director who loves to destroy cities, especially American metropolises, and put the world in cataclysmic danger but The Day After Tomorrow is
different, this time the villain is nature itself. There are no aliens to attack or giant lizards stomping buildings to the ground, just a wounded
climate reacting to years of pollution and environmental change in spectacular fashion.

The wizards behind the special effects have a field day, producing some of the most devastating phenomena that nature could unleash. You sit in awe as tornados rip through the L.A. skyline and your jaw drops as a giant wall of water heads for New York. These scenes of destruction are some of the best ever created and the highlights of the movie. Emmerich uses close and long shots with frightening effect as we see the destruction tearing through the cites from above and then we are taken to ground level to witness the human
perspective as the extreme weather roars on.

Mixed in the all the devastation is a story of human survival. You realise very early on that this isn’t going to be your typical disaster movie where America and its gung-ho heroes save the day by averting the coming Armageddon at the last possible moment. This is an event that cannot be stopped so the story becomes one of despair and realisation. This means characters die and the peril and foreboding is very real.

The cast do a very good job at conveying this. The very underrated Dennis Quaid plays the obsessive scientist Jack Hall very well. He has an old fashioned, slightly iconic leading man quality in a similar way to actors like disaster movie veterans Steve McQueen, Charlton Heston or Gene Hackman and this lends itself well to the genre. Jake Gyllenhaal continues live up
to his reputation as one of the best upcoming actors in the business with another good performance as Sam Hall. This character could have so easily have been an annoying teen heartthrob who you are meant to believe is
extremely intelligent but even thought it might start off looking that way, Gyllenhaal’s performance soon puts any of these fears to rest. He is
supported well by the beautiful Emmy Rossum as love interest Laura and Arjay Smith as the geeky Brian. Sela Ward is also good but slightly underused as Lucy Hall, Jack’s wife and Sam’s mother. Ian Holm brings some class to the
proceedings and Kenneth Welsh plays the real villain of the piece, the sceptical, non-environmentalist Vice President.

The movie does have its problems however. Because of the grandeur of the situation, the development of the characters does suffer because of this. Why are Sam’s grades and interest in school dipping, where were Lucy’s
patient’s parents and why most of the characters with exception of the main family so unconcerned about their own relatives or friends? The film also
needed a few more hysterical, panic-stricken people to make the situation more believeable. Also why do we always only get to see the American cites been destroyed. Director Roland Emmerich has now ruined New York three
times, isn’t it about time he took a bash at another city. We only get told that Europe is been covered with ice and that Australia was consumed by the Pacific, it would have been nice to have seen some of this, even if it was
only after shots.

This aside, The Day After Tomorrow is still a very entertaining disaster movie with a social message attached. As climatologists speculate that this could actually happen, but just not as fast, the film does make you more aware of Global Warming issues and the current environmental policies of world governments, especially the US. The film might not totally blow you totally away but it gives it a very good try.

Star Rating = * * *

Jamie Kelwick

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