A disaster of a movie

Rating: 5/10 (16 October 2005)

One day they will make a visual effect-extravaganza with an intelligent story and character we care for. Until that day we have to do it with just the visual effects. 'The Day After Tomorrow' has some great ones and at least it talks about a real problem in the world, global warming. But besides that we have one ridiculous scene after another turning this Hollywood disaster movie into a dumb comedy. Think about a couple of wolves escaping from a zoo when the bad weather starts, staying out of the movie for more than an hour, only to pop up when the central characters go out to find some food in a Russian ship lying in the middle of Manhattan. (Just read that sentence again). That every other creature outside during that hour was immediately frozen is something the wolves don't care about, I guess, so there they are, threatening our heroes. Like the biggest storm we have ever seen on screen was not enough.
The heroes here are Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid), who predicts the events in the movie, and his son Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal). Of course there are characters that belong to one of these two main characters and we have Ian Holm who is in Scotland helping Jack with finding out what is happening: global warming causes some bad weather like gigantic tornadoes in Los Angeles and a wave that flushes New York. Then it starts freezing. By the time a lot of people are dead and Sam and a couple of his friends including the girl he loves (Emmy Rossum) are in the library in New York, Jack is in Washington. We already know that you freeze immediately when you are outside in the eye of the hurricane that by then is above New York. Still, father Jack decides to walk to his son for a reason I can not think of. He travels not alone and we can think of the usual clichés the movies will give us. There is no disappointment in that area.
Director Roland Emmerich kills a lot of people in his movies. Some by aliens, some by civil war, some by a giant monster and now some by bad weather. The heroes live and even find love so why should we care? I mean, the special effects look great, don't they? That he is pretty good with the special effects made sure I was entertained by 'Independence Day' but with 'Gozilla' the magic was already gone. The trailer for that film was more interesting and the same thing happens with 'The Day After Tomorrow'. The tornadoes, the big wave, the snow, it was all there in the trailer and it really is the only reason to see the movie. I can't wait to see the trailer of Emmerich's next one.