The Day After Tomorrow: Critic Reviews

A classic, big-budget studio movie about widespread, dramatic, hand-of-God destruction and the few hardy characters who, to our satisfaction, improbably survive is no place for serious hectoring about the Antarctic ice shelf.

The picture is most entertaining when it acknowledges the swaggering cheesiness of [the melodramatic calamity freak-outs of the early 1970's].

After the destruction, the drama flails with an hour still to go.

You can finally say this about the notion that everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it: Well, Roland Emmerich has done something about it. Something stupid, but still ... something.

It's the Weather Channel on steroids.

For all its doomsaying, the movie fails to scare you into being a better citizen of the earth or even a riveted moviegoer.

It fulfills its summer air-conditioning duties with flippant ease, and its enjoyably cloddish attempts at political relevance add a fascinating layer of incongruity.

The second half ... is comically bad moviemaking.

The film shows us that an angry Mother Nature can be every bit as exciting as space invaders and giant fire-breathing lizards.

You'll be swept away by sights that you'll never be able to see on The Weather Channel.

It turns out the real question director Roland Emmerich's movie raises isn't about how much this film's pseudo-science teases us, but how much bad drama it's willing to blow our way.

Many of the cliches in this movie predate the last Ice Age.

A shambles of dud writing and dramatic inconsequence which left me determined to double my consumption of fossil fuels.

The special effects are on such an awesome scale that the movie works despite its cornball plotting.

This often entertaining movie mixes grand, epic effects and amazing visualizations of catastrophe with a sappy family-in-crisis plot that would look hackneyed in a '60s Disney TV movie.

An exceptionally stupid movie.

Teems with illogical action, improbable coincidences.

The film exists primarily to stir the senses, and on that score it is an overwhelming achievement.

Doesn't really have any interesting characters to live through those disasters and its central storyline makes little sense.

Director Roland Emmerich wows us with end-of-the-world special effects while doling out the usual schmaltzy plot and cornball dialogue.

For all of its dire premonitions, foreshadowings of horror and easy targets for Jay Leno jokes, The Day After Tomorrow is eye-poppingly awesome and wonderfully entertaining.

The first half delivers enough of what people want and expect from disaster pictures, and there are enough money-shot special effects, that auds probably will be more satisfied than not.

The jaw-dropping special effects in the weather-gone- wild doomsday film The Day After Tomorrow sweep all else away -- including quibbles about bland characterization and dead-in-the-water dialogue.

Global warming is no joke, but this is pretty silly stuff. Still, the special effects are impressive and some of the ironies are amusing.

The Day After Tomorrow isn't just bad, it's Godzilla bad, on a par with Emmerich's previous cinematic low point.