Irwin Allen reincarnated, again

Rating: 3/10 (14 October 2004)

CAUTION: Many Spoilers Within.
In all our human arrogance, let this film be a stern warning to us all: no matter how much money Independence Day might have made, you cannot create another blockbuster by simply using that screenplay as a template for another movie, and merely changing the bad guy from space aliens to mother nature. In The Day After Tomorrow, Roland Emmerich (Irwin Allen reincarnated, apparently) has attempted just that, and the result is more catastrophic than a 7-10 day return to the Ice Age. Or was it 7-10 hours? Or weeks? Who the hell can tell how long this tale of woe was supposed to have covered? (My woe lasted 123 minutes, your mileage may vary).
The Day After Tomorrow may win an academy award for special effects. But that has to make us wonder, what is the point of that award when the special effects ARE the movie, while characterization, plot, factual accuracy, etc. represent nothing more than... well, the icing on the cake that special effects serve as in all other movies. After watching this topsy-turvy world gone mad for two hours I felt like I had watched the final attack on the Death Star for two hours, with 23 minutes of cutaways to Darth Vader trudging around the bridge thrown in sporadically for dramatic effect.
Granted, the special effects are good. Very good. But when they ARE the entire film, there is no longer anything special about them. They're routine. Is there an Academy Award for Routine Effects?
Yes, as a resident of Southern California who used to live in Kansas it was interesting to see Los Angeles get blown away by tornadoes. It was quite a lark to see the Exxon Valdez go off course yet again and cruise down Park Avenue. And it was amazing to see tourists taking photographs in New York City without the police or Swat teams descending upon them as potential terrorist threats. The special effects were that good, okay? OKAY???
But the story sucked. The Irwin Allen formula (brief character sketches, two hours of action, then a sigh of relief when most of the character sketches survive catastrophe) may have worked for Independence Day, but it fails miserably in this film, for several reasons:
* The only sympathetic characters out of a dozen or so characters were the homeless man and his dog. * There was really no story. * The brilliant nerdy girl was played by a Beverly Hills 90210 lookalike who would have been better cast as a cheerleader or a Hilton sister. * There's no time frame to the events portrayed in the film. * The science is beyond ludicrous. * The morality plays (bureacratic shortsightedness, environmental protection) were about as subtle as the morality plays in Traffic. * Product placement included Fox News, as if Fox News would ever admit that global warming exists even after an Ice Age suddenly descended upon us. * A Scottish research center manned by characters who have no Scottish accents. * An Asian woman who speaks better English than 9 out of 10 American teenagers. * As near as I could tell, the hero walked from Philadelphia to Manhattan during an Ice Age blizzard--in a day or two. * I couldn't distinguish the scientist hero from the putz President, and I still don't know if the main character was played by Harrison Ford, Bruce Willis or someone else. Worse, I don't really care. * A little kid with cancer was included in a cheap attempt to manufacture some tiny strand of concern for at least one character. * Everything in the entire Northern Hemisphere is frozen absolutely solid as a rock--except for door hinges. * The President addresses the nation on the Weather Channel. * An off-the-shelf screenplay recipe that includes 1 act of heroic self-sacrifice, ten thousand acts of human stupidity and ignorance, and a couple dozen shakes of deus ex machina.
In other words, you never doubt that the main characters will survive in the end, and you don't really care who lives or dies anyway (except the homeless guy and his dog), and that spells disaster for a little thing that Hollywood used to call a "STORY".
The only thing good about this film was the first 5-10 minutes of special effects (before they became routine and boring), and the not-so-subtle irony of watching Mexico deal with millions of illegal immigrants flooding INTO Mexico.
To summarize, The Day After Tomorrow left me cold. I give it 3/10--one for the homeless guy, one for the homeless guy's dog, one for the tornadoes in Los Angeles, and one for giving Mexico a taste of its own medicine. Minus one for not allowing us to fast-forward or otherwise escape the opening trailer for some other lousy movie when you insert the DVD.