Review: "The Day After Tomorrow"
Starring Dennis Quaid, Jake Gyllenhaal, Emmy Rossum
Directed by Roland Emmerich
3 stars (out of 4)
It's usually tough to pitch a global warming action pic; add to that the election in November and critics who've blasted the film as propaganda for Kerry, and you've got a fabricated political backlash not seen since, well, Mel Gibson at Easter.
But The Day After Tommorow gets the job done. It's not a great movie, but it is certainly a good one: effects-driven, structurally streamlined summer entertainment hearkening back to the halcyon days of the mid-1990s, when summer meant nothing more than Bill Pullman as a fighter-pilot president who saved the world. How far we've come in only eight years: now when the president flies a plane, we look past the perpetually confused grin for the smoke and mirrors.
Climatologist Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid) is the requisite Rogue Scientist With A Theory Everyone Ignores Until The Shit Hits The Fan. At a weather convention in New Delhi, Jack details his climate shift ideas and warns that another radical change could happen soon if preventative measures aren't taken. A scientist asks, "When could this happen? When?" Director and co-writer Roland Emmerich doesn't quite have the stones to have Jack retort something like, "The day after tomorrow, if we're not careful." Such obedience to convention, while still so self-aware, could have propelled The Day After Tomorrow into the cult-classic stratosphere. Oh, well.
Among the attendees is the U.S. vice president (Kenneth Welsh, looking actually Cheneyish), who pooh-poohs Jack's theory and labels him unstable. The film being what it is, we know the V.P. will eat his words soon enough.
And like that, it all starts to happen. Weather patterns form and grow and combine, pelting the Northern Hemisphere with torrential rain, snow and basketball-sized hail as a new ice age begins to settle in for the planet's northern third. Jack and wife Lucy (Sela Ward) are in D.C., but son Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal) is in New York City with an academic decathlon team to spend time with crush Laura (Emmy Rossum). Jack and two colleagues set out through the deadly weather to save Sam, who is trapped in the Manhattan Public Library with Laura, Brian (Arjay Smith) and a small group of others. We know Jack will live because he's undertaking the trip for selfless reasons; his colleagues, though, are still up for grabs with fate, which religiously follows the disaster genre's dictums.
Emmerich knows those rules well: young love will be discovered and tested; authority figures are ignorant of and arrogant toward their impending dooms; the good guys decide when they will die, if at all; etc. The point isn't that The Day After Tomorrow follows such rules but that it's completely honest about it. So many summer films are fluff claiming to be important drama or stirring social commentary (I'm looking at you on this one, Troy). But Tomorrow knows exactly what it's for, and that's to provide a predictable but no less enjoyable thrill ride, which it does quite nicely. Imagine George Lucas with a heart, or the Wachowski brothers with courage.
The jaw-dropping effects are a joy to watch. A group of tornadoes decimates downtown Los Angeles, while tidal waves crash over the Statue of Liberty and flood the city's streets. The huge storm cells blanket the planet, and the eye of the cell freezes whatever it touches, creating a harrowing sequence in which Jack and Sam (not yet reunited) are forced to run for cover from the plummeting temperature.
It's a movie full of enjoyable and disposable characters, and it probably won't be remembered for much except the effects and the day when Gyllenhaal stepped from the cult-idol status of Donnie Darko (01) into the bona fide mainstream. Yes, The Day After Tomorrow is mindless entertainment. But when you're having this much fun, who really cares?
