The Day After Tomorrow Review
by Ryan Ellis (flickershows AT hotmail DOT com)June 22nd, 2004
The Day After Tomorrow
written in acid by Ryan Ellis
June 21, 2004
Roland Emmerich is a "cheap gasp" director. He'll resort to any shock tactic to make the audience gasp. This is the hack who blew up the White House, dinobliterated Madison Square Garden, and now tornadoes the Hollywood sign. Many people might not think those historical sites are sacred, but Emmerich knows he's touching a nerve when he attacks such beloved landmarks. He's not a subtle or cerebral director, but there's room for this guy in Tinseltown. He makes money. 'Independence Day' and 'The Patriot' are in the unpublished movie dictionary under "guilty pleasures that made enough greenbacks to buy the Yankees". 'The Day After Tomorrow' will not be in that same fictitious dictionary. This movie should be flushed down the hopper like so much Irwin Allen nonsense.
The disaster flick didn't die after 9/11---as some windbags insisted would happen---it just got a whole lot stupider. Yeah, baby, we still lust for destruction, mayhem, and even ultra-violent death in our movies. It helps if an aging heartthrob named Dennis Quaid and a young girl-getter named Jake Gyllenhaal are the stars of the delirium. They play a feuding father and son, Jack and Sam Hall. Boy-genius Sam treks to the Big Bad Apple on a class trip with his fellow smarty-pantses while climatologist Jack has discovered that the weather is getting screwy and our on-going environmental rape-job is a factor. The Dick Cheney VP character (spitting image of the cyborg himself, but it's really Kenneth Welsh) refuses to listen to what weather mishaps might happen down the road. A paraphrased line of dialogue---"there's no time to look at pretty clouds when money is out there waiting to be made and/or embezzled." Anyway, against all science, Hall's predictions start happening immediately. Days later, the entire northern hemisphere is facing a deep freeze. Right.
Sam and his friends are trapped in a New York library when the Atlantic Ocean makes an uninvited guest appearance on Manhattan's streets. Tankers float down the block (another GASP! moment) and it starts to get chilly. Sample dialogue from a phone conversation between Sam & Jack. "Don't go outside because the temperatures are plummeting and you'll freeze to death. Stay where you are, and I'll come and get you. What? How will I survive when I just said that the cold will kill anyone who goes out in it? Because I'm Dennis Quaid and they can't kill me off, unless it's the final scene. Even then, I think I'll be riding off into the sunset. So you'll be safe until then." Okay, I ad-libbed the last 4 or 5 sentences, but you get the idea. Sure, he's a climate expert who's spent time in the cold, but COME ON!
The movie actually works for a very---very---short while. While I thought the F/X were sorta sad for a flick with a budget the size of Neptune, the poster shot of the Statue of Liberty engulfed in a tidal wave and later buried under snow is eye-catching. But hype can't always sell tripe. The actors don't seem to want to be doing this movie. Quaid and Gyllenhaal have been more interesting while standing on red carpets than they are wading through this seepage. I'd love to see the looks on their faces when they saw the final cut. "Do I really look THAT stupid?" If they're bored, do they expect us to manufacture some excitement for them? The CG budget must have left no room for high-priced stars because---as much as I usually like those 2 actors---they're not headliners who can open just any old movie.
I wonder if Ian Holm heard that Gyllenhaal had signed on before agreeing to pander. I suspect our buddy Bilbo Baggins assumed he was making 'Donnie Darko 2: Frank Freezes The World' and said, "Me too!" Why else would the classy Holm spend even 5 minutes on such a production, even if he does phone in his performance and he's always crammed into a tiny set that might as well be its own movie? [Same goes for the mature-but-sexy Sela Ward and her thankless part as Quaid's doctor wife.] In fact, that reminds me of just how cramped most of the scenes are. Sure, the weather freak-outs happen in computer-generated outdoor settings, but it felt like the theatre's ceiling was bearing down on me through most of the movie. Then again, theatres in Toronto have been known to collapse without warning, so maybe I'm not Chicken Little and the sky really WAS falling. Phew, thank God I didn't die while watching this drivel. I'd end up in movie purgatory.
So let me explain why I'm skull-fucking 'The Day After Tomorrow'. The first 2/3rds are probably not that much worse than anything else Emmerich has made with his writing/producing partner Dean Devlin (who's AWOL here, a genius move). Stuff is breaking, people are dying, melodramatic near-death moments happen to the leading characters, and we're headed for a showdown between the survivors and that vindictive bitch Mother Nature. Eye-rolls were kept to a relative minimum for about an hour. But then came the wolves. In a chase scene apropos of nothing, Gyllenhaal and 2 suckers have to dodge some digital wolves, who escaped from a zoo and ride the subway to NYC. When you already have a global disaster movie on your hands, do you really need to add fake drama? I mean, WOLVES? And how did a couple of limping teenagers outrun a cold breeze in the big climax? You even see the insta-freeze chasing them! I laughed. I laughed long and I laughed hard.
It bugs me to no end that movies like this undercut the environmental movement. The picture tries to stand for something, but it makes its case so badly that not even those of us who enjoy breathing moderately clean air can take it seriously. If I had been sitting beside Dubya while watching this, I'd feel pretty sheepish. He'd be scarfing a pretzel and grinning about how preposterous the anti-oil liberal message really is. After I explained to him what "preposterous" and "is" mean, what else could I do but agree that we recyclers must be full of baloney (or full of some sort of meatlike pork product). If 'The Day After Tomorrow' is right, then I MUST be wrong. The "let's save the planet or it'll kill us...like, tomorrow" message is a sledgehammer for those who need to be sledged...and it's a kick in the balls for those of us who want to play ball. For the record: if such catastrophic events ever did happen, I think Mexico would tell Americans to fuck off. Or they'd at least say, "you gringos ain't comin' HERE! You don't want our wetbacks, so we don't want yours!"
Since Roland Emmerich loves to wave the American flag so much, I thought I'd resort to suck-up patriotism too. Here now is 'The Day After Tomorrow' version of the American National Anthem, the ol' "Star Spangled Banner". Sing with me:
Oh say can you see, through a hack's empty mind.
What so proudly he sold as a weather flick about the cold.
With huge budget and F/X, and the plot gears that grind.
On the big screens we watched, bought tickets like we were told. And Emmerich's pointless flare, tornadoes whipping up the air,
Gave proof to the smart that our brains were not there.
Oh say do such stupid films like these still work...
On the crowds of naive who cheer this shit like jerks?
To add to the lambasting, write to [email protected]. And check out my website at http://groups.msn.com/TheMovieFiend.
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Originally posted in the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup. Copyright belongs to original author unless otherwise stated. We take no responsibilities nor do we endorse the contents of this review.
