The Day After Tomorrow
From AwardAnnals
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| Director(s) | Roland Emmerich |
|---|---|
| Distributor | 20th Century Fox |
| Honors | |
| When global warming triggers the onset of a new Ice Age, tornadoes flatten Los Angeles, a tidal wave engulfs New York City and the entire Northern Hemisphere begins to freeze solid. Now, climatologist Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid), his son Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal) and a small band of survivors must ride out the growing superstorm and stay alive in the face of an enemy more powerful and relentless than any they’ve ever encountered: Mother Nature! | |
When global warming triggers the onset of a new Ice Age, tornadoes flatten Los Angeles, a tidal wave engulfs New York City and the entire Northern Hemisphere begins to freeze solid. Now, climatologist Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid), his son Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal) and a small band of survivors must ride out the growing superstorm and stay alive in the face of an enemy more powerful and relentless than any they’ve ever encountered: Mother Nature!
Honors
Reviews
Amazon.com
Supreme silliness doesn’t stop The Day After Tomorrow from being lots of fun for connoisseurs of epic-scale disaster flicks. After the blockbuster profits of Independence Day and Godzilla, you can’t blame director Roland Emmerich for using global warming as a politically correct excuse for destroying most of the northern hemisphere. Like most of Emmerich’s films, this one emphasizes special effects over such lesser priorities as well-drawn characters and plausible plotting, and his dialogue (cowritten by Jeffrey Nachmanoff) is so laughably trite that it could be entirely eliminated without harming the movie. It’s the spectacle that’s important here, not the lame, recycled plot about father and son (Dennis Quaid, Jake Gyllenhaal) who endure an end-of-the-world scenario caused by the effects of global warming. So sit back, relax, and enjoy the awesome visions of tornado-ravaged Los Angeles, blizzards in New Delhi, Japan pummeled by grapefruit-sized hailstones, and Manhattan flooded by swelling oceans and then frozen by the onset of a modern ice age. It’s all wildly impressive, and Emmerich obviously doesn’t care if the science is flimsy, so why should you? —Jeff Shannon
Barnes and Noble
The science behind this one may be a little shaky—the possibility of a new Ice Age sweeping the planet overnight is pretty remote. But once you can get past the basic implausibility of the premise, you’ll find that The Day After Tomorrow is, well, one of the coolest pictures to come along in quite a while. It’s really a throwback to those great Irwin Allen disaster movies of the ‘60s and ‘70s. Allen’s 1961 Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, for example, took the opposite tack and posited that Earth’s atmosphere could catch fire overnight. You take a group of people with disparate backgrounds, interests, and agendas; throw them together in a life-threatening situation caused by Mother Nature; and see how many of them survive to discover a means of reversing (or escaping) the effects of the calamity. In this case, climatologist Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid), having foretold the possibility of global warming suddenly triggering a new Ice Age, gets no satisfaction from seeing his prediction come true—because his son Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal) is trapped in New York City, which has already been swamped by a tidal wave and essentially frozen solid. As the planetary freezing moves southward, Jack heads northward to rescue Sam and others that may have survived. Director Roland Emmerich, no stranger to such apocalyptic goings-on, marshals assistance from his art director, cinematographer, and special-effects team to make this frigid farrago convincing, and it’s to his credit that he succeeds admirably. Formulaic plotting and stereotypical characters aside, The Day After Tomorrow, like Jack Hill himself, plots a course and doggedly pursues it to a successful conclusion. Although the submersion of Manhattan by tidal wave was done fairly convincingly in 1933’s Deluge, that film’s visuals don’t begin to compare to the digital magic conjured up by Emmerich’s special-effects sorcerers. There probably isn’t a viewer on the planet—in hot or cold climes—that won’t feel a chill up his or her spine when the Statue of Liberty is swept under by a monster tsunami. Quaid and Gyllenhaal are appropriately stolid in their roles and more than adequately supported by Ian Holm, Sela Ward, Jay O. Sanders, and others. Relative newcomer Emmy Rossum makes a strong showing as Jake’s plucky companion and (if she lives through the ordeal) probable girlfriend. Providing old-fashioned thrills served up with new-fangled technology, The Day After Tomorrow makes an ideal “popcorn movie,” and one that will certainly stand the test of time with repeat viewings. Ed Hulse
