So, I wanted to cuddle up with my wife and watch the seminal horror classic “Cube.” Y’know, something wholesome and romantic. Instead, she opted for 2004’s “The Day After Tomorrow.” Frankly, I would have preferred the gory murder rooms movie. Since this was a waste of an afternoon, I now intend to make this everyone’s problem.
For those who’ve never seen this film, hold on to that thought. If you really want to know, “The Day After Tomorrow” is an environmental thriller that can be classified as “disaster porn.” Basically, a film for people who like watching famous landmarks get destroyed. The plot revolves around a sudden apocalyptic ice age that takes place across the globe, following a climate scientist trying to warn the recalcitrant government about climate change, then going to save his son who is trapped in a frozen New York Library.
What’s my beef with this film? Well, I’m so glad you asked. I think by biggest problem is the dialogue, which rarely seems to rise above “talking while pacing down corridors” cringeworthy. Characters simply comment on what’s happening in front of them, usually with flip bravado. There’s little time to explore anything deeper than the occasional gazing-into-the-distance “meaningful message.”
The pacing of the slowly growing natural disasters is well delivered, from small blips in weather systems to tornadoes wrecking California and tidal waves destroying New York. However the film really seems to love the long, wide shots of landscapes, set to a ponderous soundtrack. My wife and I were joined by our almost-teenage daughter, and we were only a few minutes in when I heard this exchange between mother and child:
Daughter: Mu-um, this is the longest intro sequence ever!
Wife: You’re supposed to be experiencing awe at nature’s majesty!
Daughter (sullenly): Well… I’m not.
To be fair to my daughter, the film relies heavily on CGI that now seems horribly dated, including copy/pasted birds, photoshop ice effects and the least-believable wolves since Gmork from The Never-Ending Story. That said, the scenes of devastation over California, New York, and Japan are pretty damn epic, so credit where credit is due in that respect.
The other big problem with this film is an over-stretched plot, with multiple character stories that went nowhere and served very little purpose other than pathos. I mean, most of these needless characters died, but they took up valuable screen time that could have fleshed out a smaller cast. The head-scratcher for me is the main character’s dangerous trek to New York, during which his friend died, so that he could get to his son and…? And what? Like most of the plotlines in this film, nothing was actually achieved. The closest we got to character development was a very young Jake Gyllenhaal getting a girlfriend.
The film does deliver a stern warning about the potential disasters of unchecked climate change, which is good, if a little ham-fisted in the delivery by the evil capitalist US politician tearfully recanting his materialistic ways. I’m fairly certain that there’s a special limited edition of this movie featuring Al Gore in the background, furiously scribbling notes.
However, “The Day After Tomorrow” does have an unexpected upside. Australia was completely untouched by the snowy Ragnarök. With the US, Europe, Russia and Asia all frozen over, this film depicts the inevitable rise of the Global Superpower from Down Under. The Kangaroo will rule the world with an iron fist and our army of weaponised emus!
Until then, please feel free to leave a comment below or suggest your own disaster movie for the next review. Cheers!
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