From the Archive – MOVIE REVIEW – The Day After Tomorrow

Originally posted 6/4/04

The Day After Tomorrow
Director: Roland Emmerich
Writers: Roland Emmerich and Jeffrey Nachmanoff, from a story by Roland Emmerich
Producers: Roland Emmerich, Mark Gordon
Stars: Dennis Quaid, Jake Gyllenhaal, Emmy Rossum, Sela Ward, Ian Holm

In Independence Day we had aliens to fight against, which involved zooming around in planes and spaceships and cracking jokes. So even though the human death toll was in the millions, if not billions, we could still have some fun watching it.

But in The Day After Tomorrow, the bogeyman is cold air, and really not much can be done in the face of that but freeze in it and die. Not so many chuckles there.

So I find myself applying Bizarro-world logic to another story about the death of billions – should I be having fun with this? Dennis Quaid, in the role of rugged “paleoclimatalogist” Dr. Jack Hall, sure doesn’t crack many smiles as he trudges across the icy wasteland that used to be the Northeastern United States. Has Roland Emmerich made a Serious Movie?

The answer is no, he’s made another Big Dumb Blockbuster, as is his stock-in-trade, but has chosen for it a subject matter that does not lend itself to the kind of zesty guilty pleasure we took from Independence Day or Stargate. Despite occasional flashes of gallows wit, this is an ill-fitted movie, doofy summer entertainment playing dress-up.

As we open, Dr. Hall and his loyal sidekicks – you know the type, jocular wise-cracking buddies who stay by our hero’s side because, it would seem, they have no family or friends of their own – are conducting research in Antarctica when a chunk of their ice shelf the size of Rhode Island suddenly shears off, with the crack forming right in the middle of their camp, naturally.

We then cut to New Delhi, where it’s incongruously snowing, and Dr. Hall is delivering a stern warning to various important-looking people about the dangers of global warming triggering a new ice age. But how could warming cause an ice age? some of them chuckle, using the same scoffing tone creationists use to show how contemptibly absurd an idea it is that a man could evolve from an ape. They are so oblivious to Dr. Hall’s explanations that I half expected one of the dignitaries to interrupt with – please, Dr. Hall, what are these “polar ice caps” you speak of?

This movie counts on its audience knowing the broad strokes of the global warming phenomenon – that “greenhouse gases”, pollutants trapped in our atmosphere, will warm the Earth, melting polar ice caps, flooding coasts and radically changing our climate. Armed with this, we are invited us to mock naysayers like the scowling, bespectacled Vice-President (Kenneth Walsh), who for purposes of making a point with subtlety might be named “Rick Craney”, “Nick Haney”, or simply “Vice-President Greedy Oil Tycoon Ratf***er.” IMDB lists his name as “Vice-President Becker”.

Of course, Dr. Hall is even more right than he realizes – what science tells us would be disastrous occurring over the course of decades soon unfolds on-screen in a matter of days. Tornadoes carve up Los Angeles, giant hailstones pummel the citizens of Tokyo, and torrential rains flood New York, where it just so happens Hall’s son Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Laura Chapman (Emmy Rossum) the ravishing braniac he’s sweet on, are competing in a national scholastic Decathlon.

Roland Emmerich is most comfortable in the kind of movie where an actor looks at an innocuous computer monitor, then suddenly…something…starts…blinking! and the actor’s face pales in horror and bass notes thoom away on the soundtrack. In this movie, most of that task falls to Ian Holm as Terry Rapson, who is in a lonely monitoring station in Scotland when it all starts to go bad.

As he phones Dr. Hall every so often to remind him, the North-Atlantic Current has been disrupted, which creates three “superstorms” – land-bound hurricane-like blizzards whose central eye funnels super-cold air directly downward from the upper-reaches of the atmosphere like some ghastly freeze ray. People caught in it ice over and perish in mere seconds, and one of them is headed straight for New York. Holm plays most of his part with the same look of poignant, dignified sadness he probably got as soon as he was offered the role, and realized there was no way in the world he was going to be alive by the end of the script.

Briefing the White House with the shocking news that just about everyone in the Northern half of the country is a write-off, and the rest need to evacuate to Mexico (which, in a moment of satisfying irony, causes Mexico to close the border and panicked American families to try and sneak across), Hall then decides that the best thing for him to do is set out, on foot, to reach his son.

After all, he has made a promise. To rescue him? No, not really, since he won’t be taking along a helicopter or ice skiff or anything. Was the promise to bring supplies? Well, beyond Hall’s own survival gear, not really that either. But he did promise to come for him. See, Dr. Hall is that heroically sad father who realizes now, with the world going mad, that he just spent too much time at work.

And so we watch Dr. Hall and his sidekicks shuffling towards the frozen, half-submerged towers of Manhattan, while Sam and Laura, holed up with survivors in the Public Library, exchange cute factoids and flirt awkwardly. This is one of those movies where half the planet dies in varied horrible ways – one reporter is smacked into oblivion by one of LA’s famous “Angelyne” billboards – but we’re happy because the pretty people lived, and were generous enough to let some funny character actors share the fireplace with them along the way.

We get a few good chuckles – what’s not to love about a climactic Presidential address being carried on the Weather Channel? But at the end of the day, even the heroic Dr. Hall has no better advice than take cover and try to wait it out. Despite some extraordinary visual effects and the charismatic presences of our leads, that’s just not the type of message to get me excited in a movie this big.