Be good or the environment's gonna getcha

Rating: Null/10 (28 September 2004)

clumzy's Take on The Day After Tomorrow (2004) - Rating - Worth Renting
I've never been a involved in a natural disaster. The closest I've ever come was having my cruise ship diverted from Cozumel, Mexico to Key West, Florida because of a Caribbean hurricane. We had a few waves, I hurled, no biggie. But there is something compelling about a disaster that takes regular people and rallies them around a common cause, a common threat. That is the magic of these epic disaster movies.
Present day America, Jack Hall (Dennis Quad), an adventurous environmental scientist, presents startling research about a coming Ice Age to political delegates of the world. None heed his warnings and before you know it we've got swelling seas, three giant super-cooling hurricane-like storms and a subsequent icing of the Northern Hemisphere. To add to the drama, Jack's son, Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal), is fighting for his survival in New York, while Jack braves the elements to find him.
We've seen this kind of movie before, like Deep Impact, Volcano, and Perfect Storm to name a few in recent history. Success hinges on playing up the "bad guy", the natural disaster, being bigger and badder than anything we've ever expected. We can't get too action oriented here lest we come up with an Armageddon or Independence Day type of implausible ra-ra Go America patronizing drivel. The story must be grand enough to apply to the entire globe but focus in on a few brave characters. And of course in true Hollywood fashion we need to be stuffed with more "spectacular" CG than we can possibly choke down in one sitting. This is the pitfall of this film and it has successfully skirted the perimeter of this waking chasm without plunging in ... too much.
One of my biggest beefs in modern movies is the use, or over-use, of so-called "ultra realistic computer graphics" that guarantee to blow the mind and most film studio budgets. Day After, uses CG in a way to augment the story, leaving the actors to act and the special effects to dazzle ... mostly. I respect this movie in that the CG, although over the top at times, was used in an inanimate way. Besides the CG wolves who make a brief appearance, the storms, tidal waves, helicopters, a frozen New York and a few explosions were quite nicely done. So I'm glad we don't have to endure a spandex-clad CG Dennis Quad swing from building to building looking for his lost boy.
The script holds together decently without any significant gaps in logic for the casual viewer. The story does fall slightly into the "everything that can go wrong does but ends up turning out okay" mode, but can be accepted by this film-goer's suspension of belief. Quad and Gyllenhall perform admirably in the limited roles they've been given, facing adversity, fighting for their survival where others would fail. Hokey love mush is kept to a minimum and to a certain extent the human running, jumping and sliding stuff actually does add to this mostly grand scale movie. Let's just leave it at that.
I'm convinced that they could make a killer natural disaster movie if they put together a meteor hitting the Earth at the same time that a giant hurricane was tearing up the coast and a volcano was exploding and then the ice age came and froze everything up. Oh ya and let's throw in some aliens and a twist ending like 6th Sense and we've got a masterpiece. Let's be glad Day After only hits one of those. The only other issue I have with this movie is that Canada is apparently completely decimated by the ice age and we all die. Man, we're Canadians, if there was ever another ice age we'd all be out skiing, snowshoeing and playin' hockey. Sheesh, Hollywood!