This should have been a silent film...

Rating: 5/10 (30 May 2004)

I am rarely motivated to write a movie review and I was hoping to forget 'The Day After Tomorrow', well, by the day after tomorrow, but after I saw some people giving this 'film' a 10, I was more than a little stunned. I was shocked. I was so shocked that I was compelled to express my opinion because $10.50 is a lot of money to spend on a movie and you might just want to hold off on this one.
Just a warning that there might be spoilers ahead, although I think that most of what I have mentioned has been regurgitated in trailers and interviews in the overbloat of press this film has already received.
I didn't expect much from 'The Day After Tomorrow' other than cool eye-candy with a sci-fi/ action bent, but my enjoyment of this firm was severely hampered by it's lack of everything but special effects. Moviegoers should be insulted and outraged that Roland Emmerich believes us to be such morons that we wouldn't think the premise laughable or that we have enough brain cells to require even a vaguely believable story.
My main problem with the film is the foundation on which it is based-a sudden Ice Age, preceded by a 'super-storm' that instantaneously freezes everything in it's path, all triggered by the effects of global warming. I am not a scientist, but I am also not an idiot. I would have had an easier time believing that the cousins of the aliens that were defeated in 'Independence Day' came back and zapped the Earth with a giant 'Freeze-o-ray'. Had these chilling events taken place over a much longer timeframe, perhaps suspending belief may have been a little easier, but then again, 'The Millennium After This Millennium' isn't quite as catchy. I'm sure in the hands of a talented screenwriter and director, this concept could have been not only credible, but interesting and thrilling. This is not the case here.
To make matters worse, Emmerich dragged out every disaster movie cliché he could think of to substitute having to create any kind of story-and poorly at that. The crapfest escalates from the standard tale of a family separated as the impending doom approaches when such formulaic obstacles arise like a wife in jeopardy when she can't leave her wide-eyed young cancer patient behind, a bull-headed vice president and clueless president fumble the ball and make the situation worse (wonder where this 'plot' was borrowed from??), and a super- hero climatologist that can somehow trek hundreds of miles in the snow while mere mortals all pass out from the cold and die. But the most amazing of these plot devices is how the geeky son also gains super-powers (and imagine, just the day before he was failing calculus!) and now he can scale frozen ocean liners without mittens, make a homemade syringe out of charred encyclopedias and splinters to inject Penicillin into his dying love interest (must have been in the deleted scenes because I'm not sure just how his dying love interest was saved with just a bottle of injectable Penicillin and no syringe) and fend off a pack of rabid wolves with a ginsu knife (as if freezing to death wasn't enough). The son also suddenly has full understanding of climatology after a 5 second-long underwater conversation on a pay- phone with his climatologist father (not quite sure how the NYC pay-phone worked underwater as most of them don't even seem to work even when it isn't raining buckets) where the topic isn't mentioned, but he somehow knows that the approaching wall of gray special effects is bad and should be rapidly avoided.
I can't say that the acting was bad because the actors didn't say much other that 'Get out of the way!' and 'Watch out!' Perhaps films of this genre would make the case for computer generated actors to a) save money and 2) preserve the reputations of the actors that trade in their integrity for the 'big pay day'. However, I give kudos to Jake Gyllenhaal because I read somewhere that he attempted to improvise some of his lines to make them better-notably visible in the heartfelt tap on the shoulder he gave to said love interest so they could scamper away from the approaching wall of Atlantic Ocean. That worked much better than the prescribed 'Look out!'
The only part of the movie that was enjoyable was the special effects-the flooding and freezing of New York was pretty cool, the hail storms were very realistic, and the computer- generated storm graphics were impressive. The only special-effects which could have been better was the tornado-destruction of L.A. Although I enjoyed watching L.A. have it's first really bad hair day, it looked too much like animation. However, I could have sat for two hours just watching the special effects without any of the characters or 'plot' (or audio) and would have enjoyed the film much more.
It is sad that Roland Emmerich chose to infuse such an important message about global warming into such a ridiculous package. And make no mistake-the message is quite heavy-handed throughout, down to blaming the no-so-coincidental look-alike Bush-Cheney nincompoops for freezing the entire population of the northern states. Perhaps Emmerich conceived the film in response to Bush's tragic pull-out from the Kyoto Protocol, which will have a serious impact on the environment. However, the hundreds of millions of dollars would have been better spent elsewhere (removing Bush from office perhaps?) rather than making this waste of a film that misinforms the world about the true catastrophic effects of global warming.
So let's recap-a premise that doesn't make sense, no plot, actors that could've been replaced by CGI, and a resulting film that belittles the true global warming cause-I'd say we should all band together and get our money back from Fox.