Brrr!

Rating: Null/10 (1 June 2004)

***SPOILERS HEREIN***
First of all, I nominate this film for having the worst title of any summer movie this year. I tried and tried to understand why this film is called The Day After Tomorrow, but there seems to be absolutely no reason for it. Does it refer to hope for mankind in the face of insurmountable odds? Perhaps, but I hardly think such an abstract concept would be pushed in a film which purports that a new ice age can happen within a day's time. This is no-brainer entertainment anyway.
Dennis Quaid is pretty good, playing the befuddled scientist character that Jeff Goldblum played in Independence Day. Perry King plays the obstinate Bill Pullman from ID. Sela Ward plays the cool and distant wife from ID. There is also a dog, a homeless man, a crusty cop, a person in need of medical attention (two of them), and an icy vice-president, all of whom were lifted straight from Independence Day. Geez, it wasn't hard to write this movie, all that was left was an unstoppable force, which was played by aliens in Independence Day and in this movie by the weather. Yes, this is a movie about weather. To emphasize the fact, the vice president addresses the nation on the weather channel.
There are several fantastic scenes of Los Angeles and New York being destroyed by tornadoes and tidal waves, respectively. It is an awesome spectacle, too big for words and well worth the price of admission. Curiously, all other cities are ignored. It must have been prohibitively expensive to swath the Eiffel tower or Big Ben in ice, even CGI-style, though they did set aside money for CGI wolves, which aren't very realistic. Why is it that CGI always looks like it? Jurassic Park was released in 1993, the infancy of CGI, and yet the dinosaurs are infinitely more convincing than the fake fur and eyes of a pack of newly-released wolves from the New York zoo.
The movie drags and drags during times when there isn't something spectacular happening (read the entire last hour of the film). There is not just one cliffhanger but two of them, as though the screenwriter wasn't imaginative enough to think up something else. The whole wolf thing was beyond tiresome, a drama invented after all the bad weather already happened. Why the wolves didn't go after the thousands of people who walked away on the ice is never explained.
As in all disaster films, none of the characters shows the slightest degree of shock. New York is first buried under water, then under a blanket of snow, millions of people are killed, and yet the librarian is more concerned about a book than anything else. What bothers me about this kind of movie is that people still want to see them: after the horrors of the WTC attack, I'm surprised that anyone would want to see a movie like this. It's almost as if people want to be afraid of something, to get a little thrill out of it, like roller coasters or paint ball games, as though we have a need to be afraid.
Morality lessons pepper the film from start to finish, as Quaid rails against the evils of resource misuse. To emphasize the point, he drives a nerdy little lime-green car (the same part played by a bicycle in Independence Day). The movie fades away into nothing, implying that the U.S. is now one-third of its original size. At this point, the cautionary fable about planet abuse is supposed to sink in, enraging conservatives and causing them to snort derisively. Why does this film suck so much? Because at its heart it's a pretty boring film. It's about weather, for god's sake.