The Day After Tomorrow (2004)
Note: Some spoilers.
There are summer movies that are
good popcorn flicks worth seeing once and then there
are those that are so astounding and amazing that
you have to see them again and again. "The Day After
Tomorrow" is not one of those latter kinds. I wanted
to see "Twister" more than once. I saw "Independence
Day" four times. With this film, once is enough. While
the special effects in the film are awesome and the
acting is quite good, the film starts with a bang
and ends with a whimper, much to its detriment. This
is a film that starts with tornadoes, typhoons, hurricanes,
tidal waves, baseball sized hail storms and floods
and ends with the momentum stopping climax of a glacier.
There's been lots of talk about
the "bad science" in the film and to that I say: Who
fucking cares? Anyone who is going to see this film
to see how scientifically sound it is must be a complete
loser. The kind of person who lambasts this film for
bad science is the kind of person who will post a
plethora of verbose diatribes about the film's bad
scientific foundation on the Internet Movie Database
(imdb.com) site for the films "Goofs." This is just
ridiculous.
However, I can see how the Republican
party would want to do everything they could to dismiss
this film even if it meant picking on its supposed
bad science. The president and vice- president portrayed
in the film are modeled directly after George Bush
and Dick Cheney. The Cheney character is shown to
be the real decision maker and powerful person here.
Hell, the best thing about the film is what happens
to these characters. Bush's doppleganger dies (not
even on screen, we hear about it in dialogue) while
the Cheney clone has to go on television and eat humble
pie while thanking third world countries for their
charity and hospitality. It's fucking awesome.
The story here is based around characters
and, like "Titanic" and a thousand other disaster
films, we are first exposed to characters and then
expected to care about them when they are in peril.
The script here is trite and obligatory with Dennis
Quaid playing an absentee father and hottie Jake Gyllenhaal
(can I start calling him Jake Hottiehaal?) playing
the proverbial troubled teen. This script is so short
on character exposition that these two are forced
to shorthand a relationship that we will care about
seeing resolved. It is only because these two actors
are so good in their roles, particularly Hottiehaal,
that this works. We DO care about what happens and
we DO want to see them reunited at the film's end.
It is a testament to how good an actor Gyllenhaal
is that this film works at all.
In the end, "The Day After Tomorrow"
is about the frailty of humanity, and this is greatest
triumph. It's no accident that Gyllenhaal's young
character is awkward, quiet and unable to express
himself. It's no accident that when he is able to
finally speak out, he is unable to convince the majority
of his fellow travelers that he is correct. His debility
here is that of all humanity, that we are sometimes
powerless and hopeless in the face of great obstacles.
When we see the world begin to crumble under the catastrophic
chaos of weather gone out of control in the film,
we begin to see how much we take for granted as humans
living on the planet. "The Day After Tomorrow" reminds
us how quickly disaster can strike and how helpless
we can become when facing it. But, as we would wish,
the film ultimately shows us how our weaknesses, even
our past trespasses, can be overcome and forgiven.
In the end, even with our inherent frailty and our
apparent inability to control Mother Nature, we still
somehow survive. In the end, as we hope, there is
a new day... and a second chance.
Note:
Also with Dash Mihok, Emmy Rossum,
Sela Ward, Ian Holm and Perry King.
Roland Emmerich is the director,
story writer, co-script writer, and a producer. Emmerich
credits "The Coming Global Superstorm" by Whitley
Strieber and Art Bell as a source of inspiration for
the film.
At certain times the film was known
simply as "Tomorrow."
Gyllenhaal, whose mother is a writer,
claims he re-wrote many of his lines.
Viewed in Austin in May 2004.
