Day After Tomorrow
Will state-of-the-art Hollywood CGI fx and director Roland Emmerich succeed where Al Gore and many a frustrated environmentalist have largely failed: raising the  world's consciousness about the dangers of global warming? Austrian-born composer Harald Kloser has been given some striking imagery to score -- New York  City inundated by the rampaging floods of a new ice age; Hollywood itself beset and torn asunder by swarming tornadoes -- but the TV and European film veteran  (this marks his big-budget American film debut) succeeds by largely underplaying his orchestral writing, imbuing it with a mounting sense of drama and inherent  tragedy. The elegiac, bittersweet beauty of his main theme suggests a more organic take on Hans Zimmer, while elsewhere his cues show a graceful maturity that  seems rooted largely in the 20th century Russian classical masters. And while Kloser gets ample opportunity to musically portray that humanity-polluted Nature can  be one unforgiving mother, his work seldom condescends to its audience -- or sinks to the level of typical disaster filmsturm und drangoverkill.--Jerry McCulley