It took me a longtime to decide whether this film was worse than Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor was really bad, and while I thought The Day After Tomorrow had better dialogue and acting... there were just so many things wrong with this film. The science is so wrong it trivializes the political views the film allegedly sought to promote.
The film begins with Dennis Quaid in Antarctica drilling ice core samples. The ice suddenly begins to crack and he nearly falls to an icy cold death. This was a horrible introduction for this climatologist/geologist - who apparently was completely unaware that the ice below him was unstable. Lame.
He then travels to this meeting and seeks to present his views on the longterm effects of global warming, but the diplomats at the UN scoff at his theories, and he goes home dejected. Maybe the politicians heard about his Antarctica misadventure.
The weather is highly personified in this film. It is evil. First it decides to destroy Tokyo, and Los Angeles. Then the weather decides it wanted to flash freeze a bunch of flying Royal Air Force helicopters. The helicopters apparently flew into a pocket of air at -150°F (-101.1°C), froze in midair and crashed. The crew members are instantly turned into icicles.
How is this possible? I do not know.
So basically Dennis Quaid's son is stuck in Manhattan in the cold. Dennis Quaid walks in the snow and makes his way from Washington, D.C. to New York City (in the process watching a friend fall through a glass ceiling in a snow-covered building).
The son, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, starts burning books in the New York Public Library. He and his friends fight off wolves (that somehow survived despite the massive temperature change), find antibiotics, and live off nachos and candy from vending machines.
Eventually Dennis Quaid arrives in New York, checks out the Statute of Liberty (frozen in sea ice), and they all get airlifted out of this frozen hell by helicopters.
This film was atrocious. Instead of awakening people to the potential dangers of global warming, this film probably did more to discredit the possibility that global warming may lead to massive and deadly environmental change. The crazy effects personified the weather as this cool calculating freezing murderous machine.
It also failed as a scare film because it personifies the weather as this rapidly changing, human chasing, freezing monster, that kills everyone in its way. Unlike Friday the 13th movies (which discourages teenage sex by killing off fornicating teenagers), The Day After Tomorrow seems to say... you're screwed no matter what you do! You're all screwed because politicians didn't listen to celebrity climatologists! Wa ha ha ha ha!
3 comments:
Will there be a companion series of posts? The best 5 films you've been fortunate enough to see?
;) of course!
Jess, I asked him if he would do a top 5 when he first started the worst 5 list, and he was like "I dunno...it's hard to decide that"
It's quite hard to qualify "best"--is it a movie that you could watch over and over? or one that you wouldn't necessarily want to watch over but one that you had a really great experience watching the first time? Enjoyableness doesn't always correlate with stringent definitions of quality... Dream of a Warrior definitely ranks up there in enjoyableness (for me at least) but definitely not good cinematics...
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