Over-hyped, disappointing

Rating: 4/10 (20 October 2004)

This was a film that had potential but fell far short of my expectations. It had an excellent cast that was wasted with over-used apocalyptic clichés and poor dialogue that I came to easily anticipate. It came across as being rapidly thrown together, packaged and then tossed out to get it to the screen. The opening of the film in the arctic was an excellent setup for the whole story, especially with the sudden cracking of the ice shelf. After that point, the whole story took a nose-dive.
Where to begin.... For starters, it was scientifically unbelievable for such a sudden climate shift to occur and instantly begin melting polar ice at such a dramatic rate. Even the largest sections of polar ice that have broken apart in reality have never done this nor affected ocean currents as depicted. The multiple-tornadic storms over Los Angeles were completely implausible on the scale shown and the massive, hurricane-like storms drawing freezing air from the near-vacuum of the outer atmosphere all fed the impression that this was a story that had to build into a "mankind-is-doomed" warning very quickly. And, I'm sorry, but for Dennis Quaid and his pals to walk in a blizzard from eastern Pennsylvania to New York city was a total miss.
Dennis Quaid and Ian Holm are awesome talents deserving of a better script. In the tent outisde New York when Quaid's character warns that "mankind must learn from his mistakes" with fossil fuels??? Even Jake Gyllenhaal, an emerging talent, warranted better lines than where he warned everyone leaving the library about the storm; "It's going to get bad....really, really bad...."
There were relationships to tug at your heartstrings. Sela Ward worrying about the child cancer patient, Dennis Quaid saying good-bye to Ian Holm in snow-ridden Scotland and then Jake Gyllenhaal finally connecting with Emmy Rossum's "I-secretly-do-care-for-you" Laura character.
The political messages were there, too. Who couldn't tell that Kenneth Welsh was a direct comparison to Vice President Cheney (of the "evil" corporation Halliburton)? The dialogue given his character about the how all this would affect the economy was an obvious political ploy and had no other reason in the story at all. Don't forget the obvious presence of the Saudi representatives at the beginning during the summit on "global warming".
This doesn't come close to better disaster films such as "Deep Impact" or "Earthquake" from the 1970's. At the least, those films are much closer to scientific and human reality and had better screen writing. The special effects of "The Day After Tomorrow" were very good but not enough to rescue the story. I borrowed a copy from a friend and glad I didn't spend the cash to rent it.