Big Movie, Small Brain, No Dice

Rating: 1/10 (20 June 2006)

A disaster movie about global warming was inevitable. So was having it be directed by a director known for special effects movies. Then of course you'd also expect a big name cast (Quaid, Gyllenhaal, Holm... that's three at least). I think we all sort of expected something more in the drama department. Special effects and disaster film are not known for great dramatic conflict, but most of them at least take a stab at it. In "The Poseidon Adventure" the characters were pretty defined before they started to get killed off. "The Towering Inferno" successfully hinged on (somewhat cheesy) dramatic conflict around the characters of the architecture firm. More recently, brainless Bruckheimer himself injected enough solid sap into "Armageddon" to make us all go for our hankies. But then comes "The Day After Tomorrow"...
Dennis Quaid is not just a climatologist, he's a bad-ass climatologist. We first meet him jumping a massive crack forming in an icecap just in time to save valuable plot devices. When he's done being cool, we go home and meet his somewhat estranged son/eye candy Jake Gyllenhaal, and his underused doctor wife Sela Ward. This family is so troubled by Quaid's career that they spend all their time repeating one another's lines. And there's the tear-jerking trouble that young Gyllenhaal is so smart that he fails calculus by offending his teacher. God forbid any of these characters get any real human flaws or that this family be allowed to represent anything more dysfunctional than common, average happy-family tiffs. These are our heroes.
So, being a bad-ass climatologist, Quaid and his expensive smile, sets out to save the world by informing people that Global Warming is going to bring on another Ice Age and doom us all. As was well advertised at the time of this film's release, this is a real theory, but that theory says nothing about the effects setting in over the course of two days. Anyhow, no sooner does Quaid try to impart this knowledge to a skeptical public and an unlikable vice-president than does the weather start to turn nasty. And Ian Holm is there too suddenly, playing a British stereotype.
Because the family is the center of the film, Gyllenhaal gets on a plane to New York with some kind of competitive knowledge team, pretty much to give a reason for them to be apart when things get bad. We meet his instant girlfriend, Emmy Rossum and a couple of instant friends. When they get to New York, we cut to the zoo and meet some CGI wolves that are acting strangely and are not foreshadowing at all.
Anyhow, everything starts getting cold all around the world while these guys in a space station watch (they should be eating popcorn or something). There are scenes we saw before in "Twister", "The Core", and "Armageddon". New York floods and then freezes, trapping Gyllenhaal and insta-girlfriend. Dennis Quaid and his token buddy Frank head off through the snow to get Gyllenhaal. Oh, and then comes Sela Ward's harrowing plight which consists of occasionally cutting back to her sitting beside a sick child in a hospital bed looking concerned. I guess Roland Emmerich thinks action (and apparently dialog) is for the menfolk. Most of this stuff reminds one of that long tag-line to "Deep Impact" that got truncated to "Hope Survives" on the poster. Of course the only thing one hopes for during this film is for it to be over so you can watch something else.
Among some of the standout bad moments in this film were: the most useless movie president ever, the unestablished reporter guy getting it, the fake wolves being used as an action device, the ultra-cheesy shots of the Statue of Liberty and American flag freezing (yes, I think we knew that New York was in the USA), the dialog that just throws the first character's line back at him, and last but not least; people being chased by the cold. In reality the cold just kinda comes at a non-impressive pace, but since this film is so action-packed, the cold pursues individual people and hunts them down without mercy. I began to feel by that point that the film was doing that to me.
In the end I'd gladly take "Armageddon" or even "The Core" over this lame excuse for a movie. The characters are paper thin, the disaster is ridiculous (however possible), and the conclusion is no conclusion at all. It all comes down to bad writing. Even if the acting was incredible (it isn't), the direction was astounding, or the special effects convincing, this movie would still be junk because the script is some weak junk. The first rule of stories where people are in peril is making your audience care about those people and I couldn't bring myself to give a damn about any one of them.