Sometime next week

Rating: 7/10 (5 June 2004)

Roland Emmerich may have scored huge with ID4, but the film was crippled by gung-ho flag-waving and a reluctance to explore the dark nature of the story. I think that Emmerich is a far better director than writer, but even though he once more pens the screenplay here he wisely opts to make it a much more serious film. Where he once destroyed the Big Apple and the Big Orange with fire, now he does it with water, but no one's laughing. And Will Smith isn't in it.
Dennis Quaid (brother of ID4's hero) stars as a climatologist who predicts that a new ice age will freeze Planet Earth within the next few hundred years. An enormous chunk of the Larsen Ice Shelf in Antarctica breaks off and melts into the Atlantic, shutting down the gulf stream. Hurricanes form all over the world, with twisters and storms ripping though major cities. A flood submerges New York, trapping Jake Gyllenhaal and his classmates in the New York Public library. With nowhere to go they wait it out as dad Quaid promises to rescue them.
There's no winning this time round. Everyone is a loser as the world goes into a deep freeze, covering most of America and Europe in a hundred feet of snow. But this film is about the journey, and the destination, not the end result. There are some clichés and a little bit of humor, but they're all subdued and do not annoy as much as they did in ID4. The only disappointment is Harald Kloser's bland, uninteresting score with is a far cry from the sorrowful, romantic themes from Armageddon by Trevor Rabin, an approach which really could have worked here.
While it ain't no masterpiece, it's one of Emmerich's better movies and, despite the exaggerated portrayal of climate change, will last for the ages, unlike it's alien invasion older brother.