The Day After Tomorrow (Dennis Quaid, Jake Gyllenhaal)
Big ol' disaster flicks seemed a much easier sell a few decades ago. An era of The Towering Inferno, The Poseidon Adventure, and Earthquake hit its heyday and was never really recaptured again, despite some more recent, flaccid attempts (Twister, The Perfect Storm, and that pair of volcano movies come to mind). While the newest kid on the block, Roland Emmerich's ice age epic The Day After Tomorrow, does not rise above its contemporaries, it's nevertheless well constructed and provides a few intermittent jolts of entertainment.
The movie juggles lots of storylines at once and, giving credit where credit's due, manages to juggle them fairly well. We have Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid), a climatologist who happens to have plenty of Antarctic experience, valiantly struggling to convince the stubborn Powers That Be that, based on global warming trends, a full-on climate shift is inevitable. Only famed scientist Terry Rapson (Ian Holm) seems to subscribe to Jack's cataclysmic theories. Of course, no one listens to them until it's too late and, just like that, the planet is ravaged by tremendous forces of nature. Check that: come to think of it, based on where the strategic special effects are depicted, not the whole planet gets ravaged; just Tokyo, Los Angeles and New York exclusively (hailstorms, tornadoes and tidal waves pummel each city respectively).
Joining the fray is Jack's wife Lucy (Sela Ward), who is given agonizingly little to do in the picture except care for a hospital patient that is left behind amidst all the global frenzy. Jack and Lucy's son is Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal), a Reach for the Top wannabe with a crush on the incongruous fellow geek Laura (Emmy Rossum, as a Penelope Cruz in waiting). He gets stuck in the Big Apple when surf's up and gets stranded inside the library, a setting which unintentionally provides some of the biggest smirks in the film. Together, with fellow students, library staff and a homeless man (avec chien) in tow, they decide to wait at the ever-freezing facility until help arrives. There's also a myriad of supporting characters, most of which, bafflingly enough, survive the ordeal. Indeed, other than an agonizingly telegraphed "self sacrifice" by one character, hardly anyone kicks the can, which lowers the stakes a bit as the disaster pic drones on.
As is Emmerich's trademark, there are some witless moments. In a scene that plays as silly as it sounds, a group of characters are tasked to outrun the cold. I repeat, they must outrun the cold. Apparently, if this scenario were to ever come to pass, the temperature would drop so quickly you could literally see it chasing you from behind, like a James Bond villain's laser beam, and outrun it by closing a door and locking it outside. Computer generated wolves also make an appearance, stalking our heroes who are searching for penicillin aboard a beached Russian ship. At another point, in a WB-inspired groaner, the rival wealthy student who has a crush on Lucy whispers to Sam to "just tell her how you feel, man." Lest we forget, there are some destructive shots of the Hollywood sign, the Statue of Liberty and the American flag thrown in for good measure. Emmerich's either the most patriotic American or the most clever anti-American, I can't figure out which.
Given how clunky the characters are in The Day After Tomorrow, I'm willing to bet a slew of deleted scenes were filmed and then cut, even though these might have rounded the characters out a bit better. However, chances are these same scenes are poorly written and might have slowed the pace down, so until it gets released on DVD (and, let's face it, this is more of a big screen than small screen feature), it's hard to say which scenario is preferrable. Regardless, when all is said and done, here we have another entry into those disaster movies, one with its action in full throttle and its overall impact pretty much in neutral.
