The Day After ...

Rating: Null/10 (26 October 2004)

After work yesterday, I went to the gigantic screen Continental 6 theatre in glorious Denver and saw The Day After Tomorrow.
It's about time another extravagant doomsday motion picture summer blockbuster hit the big screen. Director Roland Emmerich of The Patriot (2000), Godzilla (1998), Independence Day (1996) and Stargate (1994) fame really socked it to the audience with this one.
I enjoyed this film. It's so Emmerich-esque! Dennis Quaid is Jack Hall, a climatologist who figures out the world will suffer from abrupt global warming. Instead of occurring a hundred to a thousand years in the future, it begins to happen now. The special effects tense fest begins. It's a wacky special FX extravaganza!
The audience is assaulted with natural disaster after natural disaster from Los Angles tornados to massive tidal waves slamming unfortunate New York City to quick freezes in the 'eye' of the storm. Quaid makes a promise that he'll get to his young son in New York, which is now being taken over by a new ice age.
Jake Gyllenhaal, who played Homer Hickam in October Sky (1999) (a rocketry film which inspires me each and every time I see it), plays Quaid's son Sam Hall. Gyllenhaal does a decent job with some extreme action sequences.
Plus this film has a dirty homeless guy as comic relief. One cannot go wrong with positive or negative portrayals of street people and their newspaper insulation. The film gets kudos for having a destitute guy and his dog prominently featured.
It's not the best movie ever made, but it is entertaining. I recommend seeing it in theaters where one can point and laugh at the cowering/weeping children in the audience. This film is Rated PG-13 for intense situations of peril. And if the weather scenes don't scare you, the ravaging and hungry wolves will.
Trivia: Emmerich executive produced the film Eight Legged Freaks (2002), but I will not hold against him.