The Day After Tomorrow (2004)

""The Day Before Yesterday"? I dunno. I'm bad at these titles" - a review by andy-j

The Day After Tomorrow is one of those major disaster films in the vein of Independence Day (1996), Armageddon (1998) and The Core (2003). The Day After Tomorrow is slightly better than all of these movies for one reason, and one reason only - it (lightly) addresses a very real issue that humankind are currently facing and doing a pretty good job of ignoring. The issue is, of course, that we are destroying our planet.

The Day After Tomorrow is all about the very sudden coming of another Ice Age (not another Ice Age (2002)), and paints a realistic picture of what mankind might suddenly face. The special effects are the star of this movie. They are fantastic in that they demonstrate a scenario that is very difficult for people to imagine, if they'd given it any thought at all. Nice work special effects guy(s)!

The rest of the film is utter shite. Here for you, I am going to discuss seven problems to be discovered. Great hunting!

1. It is totally American-focused. Australia gets mentioned in passing once. So does Europe. After all, who cares about the rest of the world?
2. Why does the guy who discovers the whole problem also have to be the hero?
3. The movie does a great job of building up descriptions of conditions that humans could not possibly survive - temperatures hundreds of degrees below freezing, and so on. But the main characters manage to effortlessly survive just fine every time.
4. The stupid wolves bit.
5. The way the relationship between Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Laura (Emmy Rossum) develops is totally stilted. Let's see, he saves her life, they witness life-changing events, he almost dies, she warms him up with her body heat, they are both attracted to each other... yet they are still unable to go near each other? They're meant to be teenagers! After going through what they went through they'd so be finding comfort in their affection for each other. They'd be at least snuggling each other to stay warm.
6. The characters suck and we don't care. The father / son bits were the worst parts of the movie. Dennis Quaid sucks. (Okay, that's 3 things, not 1. Still, there's lots of badness to get through.)
7. Did it really need to have a happy ending?

Bah. Why even continue? It was a good opportunity to make a strong statement, but then the movie remembered it had to conform to Hollywood standards

"A huge waste of time" - a review by pearly

When climatologist Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid) holds a talk on the possibility of global warming being sped up by a series of meteorological events, and causing the rapid rise of the oceans, he doesn't realise that what he is discussing is just about to happen. He figures that the sequence of events will be able to be stopped or at the very least, the effects lessened, if the government puts their manpower behind it now. Only days later, however, the waters are beginning to cool, and the ice from the North has begun to wreak havoc on the world.

Hall figures that the United States have a day or so to act, or huge percentages of them will be dead. But the government won't listen, and Hall's son, Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal) is over in New York for a school quiz of some kind, and will be worse affected by the disaster. For the meantime, though, he's obliviously just trying to get up the courage to make the moves on Laura (Emmy Rossum).

Consider yourself warned: spoilers ahead.

The Day After Tomorrow is a disaster movie which gets progressively more ridiculous and over-the-top as it goes along. Beginning by setting up each piece of the puzzle, it then goes along its merry way cleaning up after itself. The characters are at best two-dimensional, as much as the decent actors in some of the roles try to give them more. The special effects are given more dimension than the characters, a fact which I, of course, cannot stand. I could forgive the story for much of the way through, but when the wolves took centre stage, I just had to shake my head. From then on, it was just one thing after another, with, of course, just the kind of Hollywood ending that you would imagine it to have.

Are people really so unable to accept personal tragedy that even in a film of such disastrous proportions, we're unwilling to accept that one of the main characters, to put not too fine a point on it, might cark it? Am I really supposed to believe that out of all the millions of people killed by the events in this film, that almost all of the main characters make it out virtually unscathed? Honestly, what a load of baloney.