Greenpeace's idea of product placement

Rating: 1/10 (24 October 2004)

In case you are wondering where the summary comes from, the man who founded Greenpeace, Patric Moore, once described his former organisation as "a band of scientific illiterates who use Gestapo tactics...". Things like facts, accuracy, or plausibility don't matter to the likes of Greenpeace, and it is pretty apparent that they don't matter to Roland Emmerich a hell of a lot, either. If the slightest shred of doubt that Emmerich was practically living on another planet after Independence Day or Godzilla existed, The Day After Tomorrow has completely erased it.
NASA has actually stated that the events depicted in this film were so ridiculous that they could never occur. Emmerich has it that they could occur, but he sped up the time frame. Given that Emmerich can't even hold a camera without insulting someone's intelligence or ethnicity (seriously, Godzilla was one of the most racist films of the late 1990s), I know which side of this story I believe.
The major problem with the film is that when we're not being subjected to shots of impossible action from the weather, the film is as boring as hell. Even some of the action sequences, such as the Vertical Limit ripoff, are about as interesting as the constant scare campaigns that anti-choice groups such as Greenpeace come out with. It is a supreme irony that during one of the book-burning sequences, one character states that he wants to preserve the Gutenberg bible because it represents the greatest achievement of mankind. The written word has been with us far longer than the Gutenberg bible, and since the original purpose of the written word was to share knowledge, it is more of a great misuse.
Apparently, plausible story elements are not the only thing that Roland Emmerich forgot about. During one shot of the sky as birds migrate to who knows where, said birds go straight through buildings. Then we have a sequence where three of our heroes are attacked by wolves who traveled across Manhattan to find them. Apparently, wolves are invulnerable to all the spontaneous tornadoes, blizzards, and tidal waves, we witnessed earlier. And don't get me started on the infected cut plot device. It is truly amazing how film characters can defy the laws of physics in one second by outrunning a tidal wave, and be on death's door in the next.
In all honesty, I want to know how much Greenpeace contributed towards the film's budget. If plausibility were essential to box office success, The Day After Tomorrow would have been the biggest tax write-off in the history of Hollywood. If things ever get to the stage where we have to burn books in order to keep warm, it won't be in spite of people like Roland Emmerich. It will be because of them. Ergo, nobody should be surprised that I gave this pile a one out of ten.