Snow job

Rating: Null/10 (30 May 2004)

Some say the world will end in fire, / Some say in ice. / From what I've tasted of desire / I hold with those who favour fire. / But if it had to perish twice, / I think I know enough of hate / To say that for destruction ice / Is also great / And would suffice. -- Robert Frost, "Fire and Ice"
The snow in "The Day After Tomorrow" may be deep, but the thinking that went into the film sure wasn't. Apart from fleeting references to Friedrich Nietzsche and the Gutenberg Bible, the Ice Age appears to have obliterated all traces of culture and civilization from the script as well as the city of New York where it is set.
I just saw the movie, and it'll be a frosty Friday before I see it again. OK, the computer-generated effects are awesome, with great attention to minute detail. But the acting, story and script are laughably funny. Don't take my word for it. Other people in the audience at my screening felt the same way.
Dennis Quaid plays climatologist Jack Hall, whose son Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal) is trapped in New York with the global climate gone mad. Our man Jack sets out from Washington D.C. to rescue Sam, and if you think he won't make it in time, you don't know Jack.
The science in the film is plausible, I guess, if you believe that the polar ice cap can melt overnight and cover the Northern Hemisphere in ice and snow in three days. (By the way, the opening sequence shows the continental shelf of ANTARCTICA cracking asunder. Why isn't the Southern Hemisphere similarly affected? For that matter, the weather station in Scotland is at a more northern latitude than New York. Why is it not wiped out first?)
But the film loses all credibility within the first ten minutes when Dennis Quaid pulls off an action stunt against all odds. You know then that the film has nowhere to go but down, down, down from there.
Several characters, who should know better, brave the elements unprotected by face masks or gloves, or -- horrors! -- touch presumably frozen metal with bare hands. Oh, and somebody else touches the metal handle of a door from which electrical sparks were flying a moment previously. Hello, didn't their mothers teach them right?
To make a long story short, "The Day After Tomorrow" is a mindless piece of pseudo-scientific fluff. Sit back, relax, turn off your brain, and don't expect any of it to make any sense. Just go with the floe :)