The Day After Tomorrow Review
by Harvey S. Karten (harveycritic AT cs DOT com)May 27th, 2004
THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW
Reviewed by Harvey S. Karten
20th Century Fox
Grade: B-
Directed by: Roland Emmerich
Written by: Roland Emmerich, Jeffrey Nachmanoff
Cast: Dennis Quaid, Jake Gyllenhaal, Emmy Rossum
Screened at: Ziegfeld, NYC, 5/24/04
Better check your stock portfolio. Do you have shares of Friedrich or Fedders? If so, sell those air conditioner securities now before it's too late. At least that's the implied advice of writers Roland Emmerich ("Independence Day") and Jeffrey Nachmanoff in "The Day After Tomorrow," which has Mr. Emmerich at the helm of a picture whose clunky dialogue detracts regularly from dandy visuals depicting the destruction of New York and Los Angeles. Baby it's cold outside, or at any rate it's going to be, and pretty soon, we're all Inuits, as a failure of U.S. government intelligence (double-meaning intended) leads to the ethnic freezing of most of the world's northern hemisphere.
While Emmerich's "Independence Day" illustrates the unlikely scenario of an alien invasion that brings even the Israelis and the Arab states together to fight for our lives, "The Day After Tomorrow" takes up the conflict of Man versus Nature a potentially more dangerous scenario than that of Man against Man ("Troy") or Man against Himself ("Shrek 2"). After all whatever your national affiliation, we all depend on nature to feed us and keep us in reasonably favorable climates, but when Mother Nature shows her anger with tornadoes, floods, volcanic eruptions and the like, we can become like helpless invalids.
Since Twentieth Century Fox spokesman Jeffrey Godsick says, "The real power of the movie is to raise consciousness on the issue of global warning" (per a USA Today article by Patrick J. Michaels), we need to hold Emmerich to a fair degree of plausibility. Is it really possible that hailstorms the size of bowling balls clobber Tokyo? That temperatures drop one hundred degrees an hour in Canada, hurricanes attack Belfast, and floods drown the Statue of Liberty all when the polar regions get colder while heat, stuck in the tropics, causes the stratosphere to trade places with the habitable troposphere? Not likely, but the point is made that perhaps our current President, advised in part by our current Vice President, have been too centered on the needs of our oil-guzzling economy to worry much about global warming that's the phenomenon that paradoxically causes temperatures to drop by melting at least one chunk of ice from Antarctica the size of Rhode Island.
Dennis Quaid takes on the role of Professor Jack Hall, perhaps a stand-in for environmentalist Al Gore and the entire membership of the Sierra Club. Hall is a climatologist so high up in his field that he gets to lecture an organization of world leaders and to address top level figures in the U.S. administration. He stresses the need, at first, to put the brakes on industrial pollutants like oil and ultimately to evacuate the entire Northern United States by sending everyone into Mexico and beyond. What gives "The Day After Tomorrow" its human dimension even in a movie whose characterizations are as generic as Prilosec is that Jack's son, Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal) is stranded in the New York Public Library: an event which at least gives the handsome young lad the opportunity to hit on the adorable Laura (Emmy Rossum). At the dawning of Ice Age 2, Sam, Laura, and a diverse group of folks including a wise homeless man (who advises all to stuff their coats with paper to insulate them against the cold), have ignored the instructions of a police officer to evacuate the library and remain holed up inside, burning books, to the horror of a bibliophilic woman and to the scene of a debate between two people on whether it's OK to fry the works of "chauvinist-pig-who-loved-his-sister" Friedrich Nietzsche.
The heroic and prescient Jack Hall, together with an equally selfless duo of men, trek with snowshoes all the way from North Philadelphia to the New York library, but director Emmerich uses the personal stories as brief quiet-time to show the fans of rubber-neckers in the audience what they really want to see: devastation on a global scale the likes of which have not been seen since Michael Winterbottom's "Code 46" a film about our government's denial of the dangers of global warming that leads to a dystopian society wherein the world is a barren wasteland and where shortrages have condemned much of the world's people into poverty-stricken outcasts.
There's a straight line to this film from Mark Robson's 1974 pic "Earthquake" a feast for the eyes which won awards for sound, visual effects, and the development of a new technology known as Sensurround. Like just about every other disaster movie, "The Day After Tomorrow" is strong on visuals--including scenes of tidal waves enveloping the Big Apple, tornadoes destroying the Hollywood sign in L.A. and somber scenes of high level officials saying "If only we had..." The picture is not without humor. For example, expect an audience laugh when the President asks the Vice President, "What do you think we should do?" But do we really need to hear "Are you all right?" six times in six situations which show vulnerable human beings as anything but all right?
Rated PG-13. 120 minutes. Copyright 2004 by Harvey Karten at [email protected]
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