The Weather Channel's Ultimate Nightmare

Rating: Null/10 (2 June 2004)

THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW (2004) *** Dennis Quaid, Jake Gyllenhaal, Emmy Rossum, Sela Ward, Ian Holm, Dash Mihok, Jay O. Sanders, Austin Nichols, Arjay Smith, Tamlyn Tomita, Kenneth Welsh, Perry King, Glenn Plummer. Stupendous special effects are the real stars of this blockbuster disaster flick involving a drastic change in the global weather, which unleashes unnatural activities, and a sudden Ice Age despite warnings from square jawed Quaid's American paleoclimatologist as all hell breaks loose on the world at large. Filmmaker Roland Emmerich  the latter day Irwin Allen of epic f/x laden doomsday thrillers  pulls out all the stops visually (best bits: cataclysmic twisters in LA and a gargantuan tsunamic wall of water heading to Manhattan as Lady Liberty becomes a body surfer of giantess proportions) but his sci-fi batty screenplay collaborated with Jeffrey Nachmanoff offers some stilted dialogue and questionable theories of the end of the world as we know it. The game cast however makes up for the plot holes and again the visuals are nothing short of astounding or original (check out a first: instead of out-running balls of flame, out-running wicked cold fronts that crystallize instant freezing!)