Written and Directed by: Roland Emmerich
Starring: Dennis Quaid (Jack Hall), Jake Gyllenhaal (Sam Hall), Emmy Rossum (Laura Chapman), Dash Mihok (Jason Evans), Jay O. Sanders (Frank Harris), Sela Ward (Dr. Lucy Hall), Austin Nichols ( J.D.), Arjay Smith (Brian Parks), Tamlyn Tomita (Janet Tokada),
Sasha Roiz (Parker), Ian Holm (Terry Rapson), Kenneth Welsh (Vice President Becker),
Robin Wilcock (Tony), Jason Blicker (Paul), Kenneth Moskow (Bob), Tim Hamaguchi (Taka), Glenn Plummer (Luther), Adrian Lester (Simon), Richard McMillan (Dennis),
Nestor Serrano (Gomez), Christopher Britton (Vorsteen), Vlasta Vrana (Booker),
Pauline Little (Lanson), Frank Schorpion (DC Fireman), Perry King (President Blake),
Mimi Kuzyk (Secretary of State), Vitali Makarov (Yuri, Russian Astronaut), Russell Yuen (Hideki, Japanese Astronaut), Tim Bagley (Tommy).
Distributed by Twentieth Century Fox. (PG-13 for intense scenes of violent weather and weather-related deaths)
I'm no meteoroligist or oceanographer but I can say that I highly doubt that global warming will some day cause a desalinization of the oceans that suddenly triggers, as if by turning on a light switch, catastrophic events that will send the entire Northern Hemisphere into a second ice age.
Roland Emmerich's script for his global disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow seems to want us to believe this, as the ice age blows in from the troposphere only three days after sudden extreme and destructful weather patterns around the globe start destroying cities -- snow falls in India; hail the size of softballs drop on Tokyo; the strongest hurricane in history destroys Florida; the ocean rises 25 feet in the Netherlands; Los Angeles city is completly destroyed by multiple tornadoes; airplanes are breaking apart in the US skies because of extreme turbulence, forcing the United States to cancel all flights; the temperatures in northern Atlantic ocean have decreased 13 degrees; and the North Atlantic ocean suddenly rises and sweeps into Manhattan with an initial wall of water five to eight stories high. The ice age comes when these giant inland hurricane-like storms churn so quickly that air from the troposphere is forced down into the eye of the storm. It freezes everything in its path.
The visuals for all of these disasters are more than impressive. They are freaking amazing, disturbingly realistic, and breathtaking to watch. I bet every meteoroligist who saw this film wet themselves from sheer excitement.
Unfortunately though, Emmerich does a terrible disservice to the film by not incorporating snippets of events attributed to global warming in the beginning of the film that point to the fact that our weather patterns are becoming more extreme and dangerous. (For example, the fact that four major hurricanes hit Florida this hurricane season could logically be attributed to global warming. Emmerich could have created a news item for the film that showed weather-related events progressively getting worse.)
Instead, we are treated to that Armageddon-like scenario in which life as we know it suddenly goes bye bye. In fact, Day After Tomorrow plays out much like his alien invasion film Independence Day-- but instead of aliens, it's Mother Nature. And one day she simply wakes up on the wrong side of the bed and realizes that she has had it up to her eyeballs with our insolent, greedy, natural resource wasting, and polluting asses and unleashes the Titans of weather hell and takes her revenge.
Disaster movies rarely are written well -- you have your myriad of characters who are simply pawns to the disaster; and then there are the minor characters whose sole purpose is to be the antagonist to the major characters. And most of the time the minor characters are the over-reactive, foolish kind that don't do anything the major characters tell them to do. So throughout the film we have all of these shallow "I told you so" affirmations. This film has many of these moments. And then of course you have your heros who defy logic and complete unrealistic acts, such as walking to Manhattan without freezing, like everyone else who was exposed did. And I would truly be amiss if I didn't mention the martyrs who bring that softer-side-of-Sears emotion to the film. Sometimes it works. Other times, especially if the music swells too much in the background, you end up with a heavy plate of schmaltz.
Emmerich has a sense of humor, though. I greatly enjoyed the turning of the tables -- 1. Americans storming into Mexico by the thousands illegally in order to flee the coming ice age. 2. To appease the Mexican government into allowing Americans to set up interim camps, the US government forgave all of their debt.
Overall, superior marks for visual effects.
