Roland Emmerich rehashes his favourite theme of epic-scale worldwide destruction. Nothing new, but easy enough to sit through.

Rating: 5/10 (24 January 2008)

Roland Emmerich clearly likes destruction on a grand scale. He had aliens decimating various cities and landmarks in Independence Day; he had a giant lizard flattening New York in Godzilla; and here in The Day After Tomorrow he has the entire Northern Hemisphere becoming uninhabitable due to the onset of a new ice age. In Emmerich's films these catastrophic disasters are always depicted on screen with vivid state of the art special effects. But there's always something a bit lacking in the character department; Emmerich deals with one-dimensional people, the kind of people who stay square-jawed and heroic in a crisis, the kind of people who have a cool one-liner for the most hair-raising of moments. The Day After Tomorrow has the usual spectacular destruction, convincingly staged as ever, but when the human story takes precedence during the second half it becomes clear that the director isn't sure what to make of it.
Climatologist Jack Hall (Dennid Quaid) gives a speech at a climate conference warning that global warming could change weather patterns on the planet to such an extent that it could send everything into reverse, causing a new ice age. He is largely ridiculed, his theories dismissed as scare-mongering by the likes of American Vice President Becker (Kenneth Welsh). Yet within a few weeks, Hall's predictions start to become reality as temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere plummet and inexplicable weather hits various places. Freak ice storms cause destruction in Japan; temperatures in Scotland drop so low that fuel freezes in the tanks of helicopters bringing them crashing to the ground; LA is ravaged by multiple hurricanes; and a tidal wave brings devastation to New York. Jack's son Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal) is in New York for a college quiz contest, and gets trapped when the extraordinary weather freezes over the entire city. Jack embarks on a perilous cross-country journey to reunite with his son and rescue him  and others - from the big freeze.
The scientific background of the film is loosely true  a severe enough change in the climate caused by global warming could affect the gulf streams so much that another ice age might happen. But the timescale for such a change would be centuries, as opposed to the handful of days it takes in the film. Emmerich delights in entertaining us with the destruction of more famous places  in one scene he even gives us a twister ripping the famous Hollywood letters from their hillside spot over Tinseltown. The performances are OK within the limitations of the characters  Quaid simply has to look and act brave as the worried father, while Gyllenhaal proves himself agile in a few energetic action sequences. The second half of the film deals with Dad trying to reach Son and is largely uninvolving and unconvincing. But the spectacle in the first half is enough to remind us that no-one does end-of-the-world pictures with quite as much boyish enthusiasm as Roland Emmerich! This is easy viewing  nothing new, nothing special, but watchable enough in its overblown way.