Why put off until tomorrow what you can destroy today?

Rating: Null/10 (26 May 2004)

`At the core of any 혩disaster movie' there always has to be something factual, something real for the audience to grab onto,' director Roland Emmerich has said of The Day After Tomorrow (M15+, 123 minutes). These are ironic words when spoken by the man who was also at the helm of Independence Day and Godzilla. Then again, they weren't exactly disaster movies - although they did contain Emmerich's flair for destruction, which surfaces again here. And while there are some references to factual, real-world events in Tomorrow, they never become anything more than superficial. The Kyoto Accord, which I do not pretend to be greatly knowledgeable about, is mentioned in the first few minutes. More significantly, some discussion takes place on the topic of global warming - climatologist Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid) believes that this global phenomenon could trigger a sudden shift in climates, and nobody in the White House is interested in listening to him. Of course, from watching the trailers, we already know that Jack will be more accurate in his predictions of a pending Ice Age than he realises, as massive hailstones rain down in Tokyo, snow falls in New Delhi, countless tornadoes rip through downtown Los Angeles, Scotland freezes over, and finally - in one of the most visually stunning disaster sequences ever to grace the cinemas - a tremendous tidal wave hits Manhattan.
This is where the entertainment is, in the action sequences that are imbued with a rather chilling realism (no pun intended), including a few other stunners that aren혩t given away in the trailers and won혩t be given away by me, either. Of course, a film filled with nothing but disaster sequences would be rather shallow, so the latter half of the film turns to some more personal stories, as Jack heads North towards Manhattan to rescue his slightly estranged son Sam (Donnie Darko's Jake Gyllenhaal, bringing a subtly comedic tone to the proceedings), trapped with a few students inside a public library. While the second half of the film subsequently fails to deliver the same thrills as the first half, it does uphold the suspense well enough. Emmerich's films have often benefited from the use not of action stars (Vin Diesel, anyone?) but of actual actors who take the fairly basic characters and breathe a little life into them. Tomorrow benefits from this, even if we've come to expect better things than this of Quaid, Gyllenhaal and two-time Emmy award-winner Sela Ward (as Jack's wife Lucy, who remains in the hospital at which she works, struggling to save patients).

Granted, these little human dramas, which reminded me somewhat of Deep Impact (a similarly themed movie with a slightly larger, more accomplished emphasis on the human drama), aren't the reason any layperson would go to see the film, nor are they the film's strength. The overly shallow political themes don't help the film either - despite being refreshingly less patriotic than Independence Day was, the support-your-fellow-man-and-protect-the-environment messages come off as overly condescending, particularly when addressed by the US Vice President at film's end. In spite of these misfires, the grandiose level of destruction on display is Emmerich's finest, at times even achieving a sort of eerie beauty. Films whose greatest strengths lie in their special effects are flooding the market to saturation point by now, but this one stands above most of them, which makes it worth the price of admission, even if it's not a film I'd make plans to see again.
Grade: B-