Natures answer to Mankind's excesses

Rating: 8/10 (4 June 2004)

****SPOILERS**** Even though the reviews of the movie "The Day after Tomorrow" are anything but earth-shaking the film is far better then the similar movies of world-wide destruction."The Day after Tomorrow" does not follow the usual End-of-the-World scenarios like Nuclear wars Meteor Showers and Alien Invasions. Its story is about the very real danger of the earth itself striking back at Mankind that has been abusing it. Striking back with such a destructive fury that it would put the most arrogant cocky and hubristic of us back in our place as scared terrified and humble human beings in us being petrified with fear of the powerful forces of Nature that we have no control of.
A new Ice Age is dawning on the Earth starting with the melting of the great ice cover over the continent of Antarctica. After some two hundred years since the beginning of the industrial revolution the earth has finally had enough of being abused by mankind's greed and ignorance of it's environment. These abuses trigger a series of major earth changes that are of monstrous proportions. They hit the Human Race with such force that it dwarfs anything that man has ever imagined of written about in all the thousands of End-of-the-World books and narratives dating back to Biblical times.
Antarctica is breaking up and some of the pieces of ice flowing up the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans are the size of the state of Rhode Island. These ice flows block the warm ocean currents like the Atlantic Gulf Stream which causes the ocean water temperatures to drop as much as 13 degrees in just a matter of days. As this is happening the air in the upper North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans is becoming lighter and with the melting of the ice absorbs the water vapor. This ends up forming rain clouds that pelt places on the earth ,like Southern Japan and India, with ice and snow storms. Gigantic snow hurricanes and typhoons begin forming in Northern Siberia England Greenland and Canada due to the low pressure and humidity from the melting ice. The middle areas of the earth, some 1,000 miles above the earths Equator, like California in cities like Los Angeles and their surrounding areas are hit by enormous cyclones because of the dramatic drop of barometric pressure. These cyclones link up and unite as they pick up strength becoming unimaginable forces of death and destruction. Picking up strength as they start to roll across the earth wiping cities and towns with hundreds of thousands of people off the map.
In cities in the US North-East the meting ice forms hundreds of giant rain clouds that burst open into Biblical-like downpours that last for days on end. The rains together with the raising ocean water levels sweep into the lowlands and northern coastal cities like Boston and New York drowning tens of thousands of people. The bitter arctic winds that follow these northern monsoons freeze the flooded land covering it with a sheet of ice with a thickness of as much as three to five miles deep! What follows is super cold air from the northern areas that kill and quick-freeze anything that it comes in contact with.
The special effects in the movie are State-of-the-Art realism and in many ways as real as what we read in the newspapers and see on the TV news. The lead character in the movie Dr.Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid), a leading expert of earth's meteorological changes, timely warnings to those leaders of the nations of earth to stop ill-treating the worlds environment in order to prevent ecological calamities like the one that just happened were ignored.
Dr. Hall promised his son Sam, Jack Gyllehall, early in the film never to leave him alone. Later separated from him by 250 miles of frozen tundra and never-ending blizzards, he travels mostly on foot to New York City to rescue not only Sam but his friends and a number of stranded New Yorkers on the upper floor of the frozen and snow covered New York City Main Public Library. In the movie we see what we can do by not living in harmony with the forces of Nature that not only rule the earth but the entire Universe.
There's a massive migration from the uninhabitable Northern Hemisphere to the south by millions of survivors of this major ecological disaster. Rebuilding their civilization as well as their lives the peoples of the Earth learn the values of living in peace not only with themselves but living in peace with their planet as well. The President of the United States Pres. Blake, Perry King, perished in a snow storm trying to leave,with his cabinet, the ice-locked city of Washington D.C.
At the end of the movie the former Vice President and now President Becker speaks to the people of the United States and the world on TV and radio. Pres. Becker gratefully thanks the people of the southern, and mostly third world, nations for allowing the people of the frozen and snow covered north in their countries. Telling the worlds peoples that with the help of God the people of Earth will in the future have the foresight wisdom and courage to not let cataclysms ever happen again.
Pres. Becker ends his speech saying that it was wrong for him not to do what he could have done in preventing the horrors that just happened. For that he's very very sorry and you can see that what he said came straight from his heart. But by then the damage was already done and nothing even Pres. Becker's heart felt apology can change that.