The Day After Tomorrow

Rating: ***

The Day After Tomorrow starts with a chunk of ice the size of Rhode Island breaking off the Antarctic and ends with everything north the southern United States and North Africa frozen under a new ice age, in between: super-twisters, tidal waves, flooding, snow and hail the size of your head. Again, New York City and Los Angeles have become the first strike targets in the war against disasters, but then again are we surprised by any of this in a disaster movie, especially from the director of Independence Day.

The film stars Dennis Quaid as a Paleoclimatologist whose trying to warn the Powers That Be about the potentially devastating effects of global warming, but with this being a disaster movie of course no one listens to him. He does however find an ally in another scientist played by Ian Holm whose weather monitoring station has been noticing a decrease in ocean temperatures in the North Atlantic. And since this is a disaster movie, the hero has an estranged wife and a son whom he's not that close with, a son who just happens to be heading out on a trip to New York for an academic decathlon competition with two other team members, one of whom is the girl he has a secret crush on. The stage is set.

I'm guessing that it’s the above synopsis of characters and motivation that is giving this movie its critical beating; I mean I freely admit that they are disaster movie clichés. Another reason may be all the bad science in the movie, which drew riotous laughter from of my sister the environmental scientist when I told her about it. There were also a few typical scenes like when a pack of wolves that escaped from the Bronx zoo manage to head down Manhattan island, in the freezing cold temperatures, and manage to find some of the only fresh meat in the area in the form of Jake Gyllenhaal and his two fellows who venture out to find medicine for a sick friend.

Despite all of this though I am giving The Day After Tomorrow my thumbs up. Sure it insults your intelligence in terms of both dramatic and scientific content, but hey its well meaning, its got great special effects, and it doesn't waste time pretending to be something it isn't. This a disaster movie, plain and simple, with all the pluses and minuses that genre implies.

Thank writer/director Roland Emmerich who last directed The Patriot a movie so over blown with American self-congratulation and self-aggrandizement it would have been right at home in Post- 9/11 America. Which makes this movie all the more interesting given the way the Vice-President acts almost Dick Cheney-like, in fact he kind of looks like Cheney too. The film is obviously and shamelessly critical of particularly Bush Administration policy when it comes to the environment. Although the science is bad, the movie has its heart in the right place, correctly pointing out the paradox in how global warming can in fact result in global cooling.

Bottom line: The Day After Tomorrow will not win any prizes for writing or dramatics, but it will make you forget the problems of the world for a couple of hours. Or will it?