"Nothing screams Friday night like a good old-fashioned disaster movie!"
On the most under-hyped movie weekend of the year, just between Shrek 2 and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, what's a cinephile to do? Roland Emmerich answers that, by reminding us that nothing screams Friday night like a good old-fashioned disaster movie. In the vein of large-scale disaster films like Michael Bay's Armageddon, and Emmerich's own Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow is a cornball, cliché-ridden film that says, "We could all live together in peace, if only a global disaster would convince us to." Yeah, it's ridiculous, but so what. It's fun to watch.
Paleoclimatologist Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid) predicts the coming of a new ice age as a result of global warming, but he suspects it will happen no sooner than two generations. His claims and plans for preparation are ignored by Vice President Dick Cheney...er...I mean Becker (Kenneth Walsh), who insists that the economy is equally as fragile as the environment. Meanwhile, Jack's son Sam (Jake Ghyllenhaal) has traveled to New York for an academic decathlon, where he must win the affections of Laura (Emmy Rossum).
What follows is not the thought-provoking look at the effects of environmental abuse that the film sometimes mistakes itself for, but a great popcorn flick with cardboard characters, a cheesy script, and fantastic visual effects. Obviously, since Jack is ignored, his prediction comes true, although far worse and well ahead of schedule. His plan? Draw a line across a map of the US, and evacuated everyone in the southern half to Mexico. For the rest, it's already too late. Jack, of course, braves the frozen tundra of the north to get to NY, because he promised Sam he'd come.
And that's all fine and good. Casualties abound on a mass scale, but most of the main characters make it out okay, so there's hope for the rest of the world to rebuild. So it's not exactly original. I don't think that's the point. The Day After Tomorrow isn't a great movie. That much is to be expected, but it is a fun one. So check your brain at the door, and have a good time.
The performances are nothing to write home about, but they're not necessarily bad, either. Quaid is fairly generic in the main role, and many supporting characters do just that, support him, to no great heights, but enough to be watchable. Gyllenhaal, one of the finest young actors of his generation, isn't exactly given a lot to work with, but delivers as good of a performance as you'll find in a movie like this. Ian Holm has a small role as a meteorologist, but he plays it well, as he always does. The only really bad performance in the movie, aside from several expendable cast members who only exist to be killed off, comes from Sela Ward, who reprises every made for TV role she's ever done as an overly-dramatic wife and mother, in this case, Lucy Hall.
One could find a great many faults in the logic and human subplots of the film, but in a movie like this, these elements are peanuts to the audience. They just don't care. Sure, it's nice when Lucy and her cancer patient are finally taken to safety at the end of the movie, and when Sam shares a kiss with Laura, or reunites with his father, but honestly, no one really cares about all that. What drives the film is its sheer ferocity and its breathtaking visuals.
Remember in Independence Day, how cool it was when the aliens blew up the White House? Well, there's plenty of that stuff here. A tidal wave levels New York, an army of gargantuan tornadoes lays waste to LA, and a freezing hurricane eats up everything in its path with icy tenacity. And, unlike a lot of these films, the effects are actually good. These days, most critics think of CGI as the death-knell of American cinema, and in many cases, it's true. Just look at Van Helsing. Thankfully, there's only one notable instance of poor CGI here, involving a pack of escaped wolves, and the scene is still entertaining enough that I didn't care.
Regardless of your opinions on Global Warming, George Bush, or the Kyoto Treaty, it makes for a fun movie. It's not going to change the world or make you a better person, but it should be a great way for you to kill a Friday night.
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