Back to the glory days of disaster movies

Rating: 6/10 (8 February 2006)

Director Roland Emmerich's new blockbuster, "The Day After Tomorrow", is a small surprise in this days of big budget movies with zero brains and little or no value. Emmerich has mastered the blockbuster techniques and delivers entertainment at its purest form. Sure, "The Day After Tomorrow" is not a masterpiece of film-making, and it willingly sacrifices realism for dramatic purposes; nevertheless, it follows its pattern and delivers simple minded entertainment complete with social message.
"The Day After Tomorrow" is a throw back to the days of the disaster movies of the 70s, movies where a natural disaster was used as a plot device to make dramatic scenes of survival and triumph of the human spirit spiced up with romance and family values.
Like its predecessors "Earthquake" (1974), "Avalanche" (1978) and even "The Poseidon Adventure" (1972), the movie bases its plot in a disaster; in this case, a climatic change that creates a new ice age. Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid) is a scientist that has been studying the weather; being the first that discovered the change, he gets frustrated as his predictions come true faster than he thought and the U.S. government does nothing to protect the people. things get complicated when he finds out that his son Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal) is in one of the cities that will be more affected by the storm: New York.
Just as a classic disaster movie, "The Day After Tomorrow" makes a display of special effects in order to portray the magnitude of the disaster. In this aspect, Emmerich succeeds as the weather effects are presented in an accurate (albeit very exaggerated) way. However, it is fair to point out that Emmerich went too far at including computer generated wolves instead of real wolves.
The acting is pretty much standard for this kind of movies, nothing spectacular. Quaid and Gyllenhaal are good on their roles, but those were not particularly demanding roles. Rossum is quite average at best, probably her real thing is the singing like she demonstrated in "Phantom of the Opera". However, much of this could also be blamed to the script, that follows the formulaic pattern of the disaster movie.
As usual, Emmerich does a good job directing an action movie, he has a good eye for action sequences and heavy use of special effects; while his handling of dramatic scenes still is forced and again, formulaic, it has increased a lot since his days of "Independence Day".
To summarize, "The Day After Tomorrow" is a good entertaining movie but nothing more than that. It has received a lot of undeserving bashing lately but it is a good movie in its own terms. It is not a masterpiece, but what else could be expected of a blockbuster? 6/10. Recommended.