The Day After Tomorrow, this summer’s hopeful blockbuster hit, begins the 2004 season with a blockbuster caliber bust. The Day After Tomorrow is supposed to rival Independence Day and Armageddon and any other movie where the world is destroyed and some middle-aged inattentive divorcé Dad saves the world and his relationship with his kid in the same day. Although most of these movies are predictable and overdramatic, The Day After Tomorrow takes the cake for ridiculousness and unrealism in scenes that are almost painful to sit through (and Armageddon is tough to beat). Apparently, if a man is smart enough to predict the world’s destruction, he is therefore able to survive it and is protected from the freezing weather that has killed half of the country.

Day After depicts the world being destroyed by global warming (which is actually an ice age). The storyline is rather weak, however simply taken as mindless entertainment, images of the Hollywood sign being taken up in a tornado and the entire city of New York buried under snow and ice are pretty amazing somewhat redeem the cost of admission. The special effects, which rival some of the best ever on screen, are clearly the main attraction, almost making a proper theatre (as opposed to DVD) experience necessary.

The script, written by the director Roland (Godzilla) Emmerich, does have a couple of funny and ironic elements that poke fun at our country’s political stances on foreign and environmental policy but not enough make up for the annoying characters that are mere tools to fill the setting with a meager storyline. The cast includes Dennis Quaid as the environmental scientist who is the only person who figures out the world is about to be destroyed, his braniac son (Jake Gyllenhaal), who obviously gets the girl right before they think they will die, a mother who borders on saintliness (Sela Ward), and the couple of sub-characters that are supposed to add humor to an otherwise dismal environment.

After seeing this movie, I may be a little more conscious of using aerosol cans but otherwise, Roland Emmerich, the creator and director, really froze me out of this one (no pun intended…yeah, I guess there was).  

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