not all that great but still hard to resist

Rating: 7/10 (15 May 2005)

Like a spoiled little brat having a temper tantrum in his overstuffed playroom, Roland Emmerich loves to destroy things - only he does so on a scale far beyond the dreams of even the most literal-minded schoolboy. Cars, buildings, national monuments, whole cities - nothing is too grand or sacrosanct that it can't be reduced to rubble in the filmmaker's quest for the almighty buck. He began his assault on the planet and audience sensibilities back in 1996 with "Independence Day," in which he used aliens from outer space to do his dirty work for him. Two years later, in "Godzilla," he resurrected a campy cultural icon to smash New York City into tiny little pieces for our pleasure and edification. Now, in "The Day After Tomorrow," Emmerich has gone for the gold by having Mother Nature herself - as the ultimate woman scorned - pushing humanity to the brink of extinction as payment for our sin of casual indifference to the ecologically-sensitive world around us. This is mass-market film-making with a social conscience.
"The Day After Tomorrow" is what people generally have in mind when they refer to "mindless summertime popcorn entertainment" - a big-budget disaster picture with state-of-the-art special effects, minimalist plotting and wafer-thin characterizations. This current vision of worldwide apocalypse shows what happens when mankind fails to heed the warnings of global warming: storms of unprecedented scope and ferocity are unleashed on major metropolitan areas in the Northern Hemisphere and a new ice age begins. The Chicken Little of the piece is one Dr. Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid), a climatologist who can't get anyone to listen to his dire predictions for the future until it's too late and the sky has literally fallen in. The "plot" involves Jack setting off on a suicide mission to rescue his son, Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal) and some of his classmates who have been entombed in a snow- and ice-bound New York City.
As a storyteller, Emmerich pays a price for his pedantry and social crusading, failing to provide the kind of dramatic arc that turned "Independence Day" into such a rabble-rousing entertainment. In "The Day After Tomorrow," once the destruction of LA and Manhattan have been effectively dramatized - the former by tornadoes and the latter by a tidal wave-cum-blizzard - the film lapses into a mundane narrative pattern, so that the final hour or so consists of little more than people trudging through the snow trying to stay warm. The film turns out to be almost all build-up with very little pay off. Nevertheless, some of the imagery is indeed fantastic, especially that of the skyline of New York City literally frozen under a coating of ice and snow. The characters barely register as people and we really don't care what happens to any of them, but there's still an irresistible pull to much of the film, particularly in the first half, mainly because it shows us how very vulnerable we are to the great natural forces that rule our planet. The movie makes us feel as if we are mere guests in this world, being allowed to exist here only by the grace and whim of a power that - either through malice or fatal indifference - could wipe us out in no time flat.
"The Day After Tomorrow" is the movie equivalent of a 50-car pileup. You know there's nothing particularly edifying to be gained by watching it, but you can't help looking at it anyway. You can con yourself into believing that you're studying it as a warning against unsafe driving when, deep down inside, you know that what is really holding your attention is all that destruction and carnage. So it is with this movie. The salutary environmental message is really only the pretext for watching the human race get a first-class ass-whippin'.
My only question is what can Emmerich possibly do for an encore?