It's the end of the world as we know it...

Rating: 6/10 (3 June 2004)

[Warning : some possible spoilers ahead]
There's something inherently cheesy about a disaster flick. Whether it's the illustrious "Towering Inferno" or the rather ignominious "The Core" the mere fact that the entire film is necessarily full of gloom and doom (excepting, perhaps, the ending - depending upon one's point of view) invariably means that the macho posturing and cliché heavy lines come out of the woodwork.
In that respect TDAT is no exception, but then we've come to expect these things from a good old fashioned disaster movie. Really, that's what TDAT is - old fashioned. Though clearly rather more up to date in the effects department, TDAT simply drips with cliché after cliché.
The movie begins with Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid channeling Harrison Ford) giving dire warnings to an assembled group of politicians. It seems the world is headed for an ice age in the next hundred years or so, which leads a stereotypical American Vice President to proclaim the economy is far more important.
This is about as subtle as the movie gets, but with a disaster flick where the entire northern hemisphere freezes over, subtlety is neither needed nor in fact wanted.
It turns out that Jack's predictions are distinctly incorrect, and the world has a matter of days before the weather becomes something not even the British would want to talk about. This is where the movie presents its best - the waves and tornadoes are the epitome of current computer generated effects and, for the most part, look fantastic on screen. The exception is a bizarre (and entirely unnecessary) scene with some CGI wolves. This scene is clearly intended to build some tension in the downhill slope of the second half of the movie, but fails for a number of reasons, not least of which is the completely artificial way the wolves move and act.
Once the major destructive set pieces are over, the movie descends into a slower pace with Jack trekking miles from Washington to find his son Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal in a laid back performance) who is holed up in a library in New York along with some of his school mates, including the alluring Laura (Emmy Rossum). There is a "romantic subplot" of the barest depth between the two, but it has no emotional resonance and is there simply because the genre demands it.
In fact, that sums up much of TDAT once the calamity has truly struck. Everything else that follows is there simply because it must be, according to the Disaster Screenwriting Rulebook.
The acting is mostly by the numbers, though Quaid seems to be putting as much macho into his performance as he possibly can. He manages to seem unsettlingly Harrison Ford like during his pontifications to the politicians, but makes a decent enough scientist-cum-father-figure.
Gyllenhaal puts in a lackluster and somewhat tired-looking effort, rendering Sam less than worthy of our sympathy, and hardly worthy of getting the girl (Rossum) - which of course he does in the end.
Sela Ward, and the token cancer patient she ministers, exist solely to allow a single scene of heroism from emergency services personnel, and as such she is completely wasted. As is Rossum who is really only there to look cute. This is, after all, a movie about the boys, not the girls.
The science is of course ludicrous and almost entirely fictional. At one point the main characters are forced to outrun a snap-frost that will kill them instantly. Not only do they somehow manage this feat (how exactly does one outrun something like that?), but they each do it while pulling an injured comrade to safety at the same time. This frost, over a hundred degrees below zero, is then apparently fended off by a fire so small you couldn't toast marshmallows on it.
But really you should expect ridiculous scenes like that. Again, they all come from the Disaster Screenwriting Rulebook.
More unsettling is the distinct lack of emotional response by any of the main characters to what is, after all, the end of the world. None of them cries or screams or otherwise wonders about the fact that (presumably) billions of people are dying off-screen. One short line from Laura about the life that no longer exists falls flat because we sense no real loss in her. Neither she nor Sam's other student friends seem all that worried that their parents and other friends are also (presumably) little more than frozen corpses in the snow.
In short, The Day After Tomorrow has the effects, it has the disaster, and the grand set pieces. But it is missing heart, despite the cliché of the repentant father seeking to make up with his son for all those times in the past that he wasn't there. For a movie about the collapse of civilization it's also missing tension. It guarantees spectacle and little else, but it does that spectacle well enough that we can, perhaps, forgive most of the less egregious of its faults.
In the immortal words of REM, "it's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine".
6 out of 10.