The Day After Tomorrow
To humor myself, I imagine Roland Emmerich in other professions. For example, a hit man, where the unwitting victim is not only shot but also strangled, poisoned, frozen, drawn and quartered, and blasted to the Moon. Before being eaten by moon wolves. Or perhaps a caterer, hired to furnish the refreshments at a high-profile wedding reception. The happy couple would drown in the seven hundred course meal requiring a wait staff larger than the population of Rhode Island and a cake the size of the Toronto SkyDome. Excess, thy name is Emmerich.
Either fortunately or not, depending on whether or not you want someone dead…really dead…Roland Emmerich is neither of these but instead a director of motion pictures, surely an advantage for people who want to see giant monuments destroyed. Completely. Emmerich did this eight years ago with Independence Day, again with Godzilla two years later, and now returns with a tale of global destruction…via the weather…in The Day After Tomorrow, the movie with the most fun EVER surrounding its release date ("When is it released?" "The Day After Tomorrow? The Day After Yesterday." "So today." "Yeah.")
Dennis Quaid joins the fun as Jack Hall, climatologist extraordinaire, who does his best Al Gore in attempting to convince the world that, alas, we're in for some nifty climate changes. Soon. Actually, Hall's a bit off the ball as well, rudely informing the Vice President (Dick Cheney Kenneth Welsh) that something needs to be done within one hundred years. Try one hundred hours. Shortly after Hall delivers his message of gloom and doom at one of those global UN conferences where nothing gets done, word of melting polar icecaps affecting Atlantic Ocean currents reaches his office in D.C., and suddenly those aforementioned changes in weather patterns are going to happen not in a century but, well, the day after tomorrow.
Amidst a trip to New York by Hall's teenage son Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal, minus Maggie's cuteness) and several classmates, the weather she does turn foul. Snow in India. Tornadoes in Los Angeles. Hailstorms in Tokyo. It starts raining in Gotham, and doesn't stop until the roads are basically useless…and that's before the tidal wave that turns lower Manhattan into a damned fine water park and traps our heroes in the Public Library. Then the weather really gets nasty, with several storm cells the size of Canada that take hurricane-style formations and feature eyes with temperatures well below whatever should have to be measured by mankind. (And I thought the eighteen inches of water on the Interstate the other day was bad.) The world here has to deal with a rapidly freezing northern hemisphere and an evacuation of everyone south of the Mason-Dixon line to Latin America; those to the north…well, they're pretty much screwed. But they'll get to see the destruction without the high cost of popcorn!
Admittedly, there are no cool alien ships or giant lizards, nor is Bill Pullman or Matthew Broderick present to give valiant, brave speeches that rally survivors to the cause. The characters are, in fact, much more helpless in this Emmerich effort than before, since, afterall, who can control the weather? Extraterrestrials are one thing; Mother Nature, on the other hand, is one bitch who is not Mac compatible. Still, watching the Hollywood sign and the Capital Records building uprooted from their foundations is enjoyable enough, and the sight of New York City completely frozen, eerily realistic, is an amazing show of force from the CGI department; bring a jacket for when you watch the Empire State Building freezing over from the eye of the storm. Emmerich stays true to form and pours the disaster on: Sam, trapped in the NYC Public Library, has to deal with a lack of food and colder-than-freezing temperatures outside, when his soon-to-be-girlfriend develops a sudden need for penicillin. A possible source: the ship that floated into the street and froze right outside the library. Sam's biggest threat outside the building, amidst the snow and the freezing temps and the lack of food: hungry, rabid wolves. WOLVES. I kid you not. With Emmerich, quite literally AND figuratively, when it rains, it pours.
Unfortunately, Emmerich tends to forget (or, perhaps, never realizes in the first place,) that he deals best with the spectacular and not the humane. After paying hard-earned money to see LA blowed up by tornadoes, we are also forced to witness Hall's wife (Sela Ward) distressing over the fate of a young cancer patient, Sam playing verbal footsie with a classmate, and of course Hall's artic trek from Washington, D.C. to New York to save his son…because, you know, he promised, and they never spent much time together when Sam was young. The latter plotline is forgivable; it, to a limited extent, acts as the clothesline to hang the effects upon. We need SOME type of story, afterall; this isn't a Fox special. (No, Peter, it's a Fox MOVIE. Seriously.) The other subplots, while not pointless, seem a bit silly and particularly predictable; call me a heartless masochist, but I care little about the fate of Peter the Cancer Patient and want to return to When Wolves Attack 2: It's Cold Out There. Emmerich would claim these stories serve to humanize the special effects and remind us that these are indeed disasters, taking human lives, but he's forgetting this is escapism entertainment; if we want to be reminded of how horrific disaster can truly be, we can all vividly remember September 11.
Is there a happy ending? I spoil little by responding in the positive, leaving you to wonder how the hell Emmerich gets rid of all that snow. Act of God? Aliens? Global thermonuclear blowdryers? Or maybe it's just a silly, tacked-on ending that resolves little and is present only to give the Fox Orchestra a reason to swell the score with pride and hope for the future. A future in beautiful, sunny Mexico. Fun? The Day After Tomorrow is, though I think repeat viewings may result in a slightly chillier attitude towards the film.