A dazzling dud. (spoilers)

Rating: 2/10 (31 July 2004)

'The Day After Tomorrow' does have a significant message: be kind to mother nature, but it sacrificed the importance of showing this by instead focusing on big-budget special effects and your typical, end-of-the-world family reconnecting plot (that of Jack and Sam). The movie doesn't do enough to show causation (maybe in the beginning, introducing people around the world engage in what seem like daily activities...but those that obviously harm the environment because they're done dangerously and excessively). It also seemed to lighten up by making the final effects of the storm only mild. Sure, you can ice skate on the northern hemisphere, but it'll be fine in a few days. And look, everyone who got to Mexico is alright now. It's not a pretty picture, but they should've really shown the severity of what could really happen.
Dennis Quaid stars as Jack, a climatologist, a fellow who's traveled around the world with his crew obviously studying changes in the climate. While at a press conference, he urges world leaders to take long-term action to reduce the activities that adding to global warming. The polar ice caps are melting and mixing too much fresh water into the North Atlantic current, which is what shifts warmer weather out across the globe. When it can't, obviously, things are going to freeze and mother nature is going to raise some hell. Of course, the only country who seems reluctant to do anything, arguing for economy's sake, is the American vice president, who won't take the time to brief the President on Jack's report and explain to the people the emergency they face and the policies that need to be in place to avoid it, or at least minimize the possible damage. Of course, the right wing politicians in this country were upset about that. Why not? They're still calling global warming a myth. And it's no surprise, what with politician's connections to oil and gas companies. Is it a wonder America is behind everyone else on environmental issues? No.
Then, they have that stupid family element in the story which overtakes everything else. It obscures the importance of the movie with this dumb human interest story. Jack's son Sam is headed to New York on some sort of Academic decathelon fieldtrip. He gets trapped there when the storms erupt sooner than Jack and everyone else ever predicted. The storms come fast and they come hard. We see Los Angeles ripped apart by five or six massive tornados. Scotland turns into a giant block of ice almost immediately. And in Japan, blocks of ice the size of tether balls rain down on the city. Most of the story takes place in New York where Sam is. We see little of the effects, other than those mentioned above, which occur around the rest of the world (that's the problem with this stupid human interest element and why it turns it into every other end-of-the-world movie). New York gets flooded, then it snows, and then it freezes. The whole world seems to disappear while Sam and the few survivors wait things out on the top floor of the New York public library.
And Jack is determined to get to his son via the Postman's code. Nor rain nor sleet nor snow--Jack's gonna get to Sam. And of course, he defies all laws of physics to do it.
The movie should've made the message much clearer, showing all aspects of it as cause and effect. Show the things people do every day that are causing destruction. Make people second guess what it is they're doing and how necessary it is to change these simple things (recycle or die). If they're going to have a human interest story, it shouldn't have taken the priority over everything else. Watching the Jack and Sam saga for nearly three hours is actually kind of boring, much less aggravating. And as such, it fell to the formula.