The Day After Tomorrow is an impressively big, old fashioned disaster film with a strong, albeit slightly awkward, environmentalist bent. It's pretty watchable, but isn't particularly memorable.
Dennis Quaid plays Jack Hall, a climatologist who at the beginning of the film is researching ice in Antarctica with his colleagues Jason (Dash Mihok) and Frank (Jay O. Sanders).
In the first of several epic action set-pieces in the film, an enormous chunk of the Antarctic Shelf breaks off, a result of global warming.
Soon freak weather incidents are occurring all over the globe: massive hail stones batter Tokyo; snow falls in New Delhi, and, most cinematically impressive, a devastating series of tornadoes destroy Los Angeles.
Hall soon realises that melting polar caps have poured too much fresh water into the oceans and disrupted the currents that stabilize the climate system. Or something.
Hall tries to warn the Vice President that a mass evacuation of the northern states is necessary, but just like the Mayor in Jaws, and countless other movie bureaucrats in these sorts of films, he doesn't wanna hear it.
What really matters is that it causes a super cool tidal wave to completely douse New York City, where Halls' teenage son Sam (Donnie Darko himself, Jake Gyllenhaal) is on a school trip. Managing to narrowly evade the tidal wave, Sam and several other survivors hole up in New York's Public Library.
Soon after, a super storm descends, sending the Northern Hemisphere into a new ice age. The elder Hall sets off on a suicide mission to New York with his two colleagues to rescue Sam and the others, whose fates look bad due to the super storm-created extreme temperature drop that is about to occur.
Director Roland Emmerich (who is credited with co-writing the screenplay, and coming up with the story) can direct a scene of mass destruction extremely well. The tornado sequence and the tidal wave are the two best things in the movie, and both have a weight and ability to suspend disbelief not often seen in this CGI-ridden age of movie mayhem. And they both very much outdo similar scenes in Deep Impact and Twister.
A scene where an ocean liner floats between the buildings of a flooded New York is also a highlight.
As he did with his last massive success Independence Day (but not with his follow-up Godzilla); Emmerich here demonstrates an ability to be inventive, yet straight forward, in how he shapes and frames large action set-pieces.
But what is disappointing is that there are no big action set-pieces that weren't glimpsed in the trailer. I was expecting at least one large sequence I didn't have advance knowledge of. There's a couple of helicopter crashes, and a dude falling through a roof, but that's about it.
There is one scene briefly glimpsed in the trailer that seems like it's from a different movie. It has three young survivors hunted in the snow by a pack of wolves freed by the mayhem. The CGI here ain't so great. It seems to suggest that when the icy apocalypse arrives, the biggest threat facing humanity is: The wolves will get you!
What Emmerich doesn't do so well is character stuff, but in a film like this it doesn't really matter. We get a guilt-ridden father here, a heroic death there; the occasional declaration of a long held love, but none of it really resonates.
As Hall, Quaid projects pretty standard leading man stoic concern.
It's nice to see Gyllenhaal playing a normal character for once, and the baggage the actor brings from his many oddball roles actually makes things here a little more interesting.
Relative newcomer Emmy Rossum, who plays his love interest Laura, is possibly the widest-eyed actor ever to grace the screen. She isn't given much to work with here, but hints at bigger things to come. She's had quite a run of late - she last played Sean Penn's doomed daughter in Mystic River, and next plays Christine in Joel Schumacher's big budget adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera.
Ian Holm (Bilbo in LOTR) shows up as a weather expert resigned to his fate, and Sela Ward seems to have wandered out of a TV movie as Hall's ex-wife doctor who refuses to leave a young cancer patient behind. And Perry King is the President. Yes, that Perry King, from Riptide.
The ecological sermonising is well intentioned, but doesn't gel very well with all the action. A speech near the end, when the President preaches to the nation about how ignoring environmental issues has led the world to this point, wouldn't be out of place in one of Steven Seagal's dodgy eco-action movies.
All in all, The Day After Tomorrow is big and cheesy, but very watchable. It's worth seeing, if only for the spectacle.
