The Day After Tomorrow

January 28, 2005

Rated: PG-13 Runtime: 89 min Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

The Day After Tomorrow is one of those huge summer movies from director Roland Emmerich. It follows in the foot steps of Independence Day and Godzilla. And like those two movies it has huge special effects that are jaw dropping the first time you see them. But also like those two movies, the plot is as thin as Michael Moore’s chances of getting an invitation to sleep in the Lincoln bedroom.

The story is due to global warming the climate makes a very sudden change. At first there are storms all over the northern hemisphere. We see softball sized hail in Tokyo, multiple tornados tearing through Los Angeles and surging seas that cover New York City in 40 foot of water. If that’s not bad enough, the temperature drops to sub-Arctic levels and thrusts the entire northern hemisphere into a new ice age.

This makes for some wonderful special effects and that is why people will go to see this movie. This film features some of the best CGI work done to date. The visuals of the events I described above are outstanding.

There are a couple of major problems with the movie though. First off, the characters and the plot surrounding them to tie all of these events together really requires that you check your sense of disbelief at the door. Background characters die by the millions, some brutally like the idiot news men trying to cover the events. And we’re seeing events that would kill millions worldwide. But the movie ignores that. And when we see the masses, they are well behaved, there’s no panic, no looting. They’re trying to reach safety, but they’re not trampling each other or bashing each other with blunt objects as they struggle to hoard things like bottled water. While all of these people are getting frozen, washed away or having their skulls bashed in with huge chunks of hail, our main characters can seemingly just out run anything that happens. Turn around to notice a wall of water coming down the street and what do you do? Simple, you run! If you’re a main character, you make it.

And then there’s what I’ll call the “hippie propaganda” factor of this movie. Ok, we’ll accept that this is a “global warming” message movie. But they dont stop there. It has a President who cant make a decision without consulting his VP who looks astonishingly like Dick Cheney. The U.S. government is clearly painted as a villain in the movie. The whole global warming message backfires as far as I’m concerned. What we show here is that the Earth is quite resilient. Whatever damage we as humans do, the Earth will fix. Melt the ice caps, and she’ll just have another ice age and grow some new ones. Dont worry about saving the planet, save the humans!

The Day After Tomorrow has a weak plot, and characters who are idiots and unbelievable. We also hate having politics shoved down our throat as part of our movies. So why are we giving this thing 4 stars? It’s purely for the eye candy. This one needs to be seen on the big screen. Check your brain at the door and just sit back and watch.

Posted by Billy Bob | Filed Under 4 Stars, Action, DVD, Dash Mihok, Dennis Quaid, Emmy Rossum, Ian Holm, Jake Gyllenhaal, PG-13