Global Luke-Warming
Day After Tomorrow Not Worth The Wait

Weathergirl Lady Liberty says its time to get your brass monkeys indoors in the new disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow.

At one point in the new weather disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow, the entire population of the northern half of the country is in danger of freezing to death while the entire southern half is trying to sneak its way into Mexico. Instead of showing the audience how those two scenarios play out, director Roland Emmerich pulls the camera in close to watch earnest Dr. Lucy Hall (Sela Ward) as she stays with young cancer patient Peter in a deserted hospital. Ward—the worst actress this side of Andie McDowell—tugs at her perpetually dirty hair and reassures Peter that every thing is going to be all right.

That’s how this disaster of a disaster movie goes. If you look at the big picture, the entire North American continent is being consumed by the onset of an ice age that is moving with the speed of your average hybrid Honda. On the individual level, everything’s gonna be alright (someone please cue Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy”).

The Day After Tomorrow is really a made-for-TV disaster of the week movie with a hundred million dollar special effects budget.

In the first half of the movie, that effects budget keeps things mildly entertaining. Paleo-climatologist Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid) and his personality-less assistants try to convince the government that the increase of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere and subsequent global warming have us poised on the brink of a new ice age. Faster than you can say “alternative energy sources” that ice age is rearing its ugly head in the form of tremendous temperature changes in the Atlantic Ocean and devastating storms across the Northern Hemisphere.

In a matter of days tornadoes give downtown Los Angeles the kind of smackdown they usually reserve for Midwestern trailer parks and an Atlantic tsunami brings forth a wall of water immersing the Statue of Liberty up to her belly button ring.

Quaid, one of the most versatile and underrated actors in the biz (Far From Heaven, The Big Easy, The Rookie), does his best to hold the emotional core of the movie in place but is undermined by sloppy dialogue and a storyline that keeps interrupting itself. There are about three subplots too many in this movie to hold the audience’s interest and the story would have been better served if the focus was more on the masses and less on the few.

When Emmerich is not wasting our time with the Dr. Lucy sideshow or bringing us down with the doomed British weather watchers, he has his three young male leads (Jake Gyllenhaal, Austin Nichols and Arjay Smith) running away from badly computer-generated wolves on a frozen Russian ship in the middle of Manhattan. So far this summer, The Day After Tomorrow is running neck and neck with Van Helsing for the Worst Digital Wolf Award.

The ending is particularly hard to swallow. Without spoiling things for folks who have not yet spent their hard earned cash on this movie…let’s just say that the director tries very hard to put a positive spin on a situation that may have left hundreds of millions of Americans either dead or dying. At the end of the movie weepy actors watch the President speak on the Weather Channel as he confesses that the administration shoulda listened to the scientists a little more closely and promises that he will do just that before the next ice age hits. It makes you feel warm all over to realize that the government will get cable television up and running ASAP during a global crisis.

At several key points in the movie, Emmerich lets the audience know exactly how he feels about global warming and the US pulling out of the UN-led Kyoto Protocol in 1997. Unfortunately he trivializes the very thing he wishes to emphasize by making a truly unbelievable movie about an ice age shutting down the northern hemisphere in a matter of days. Worries about global warming are based on good science and Emmerich does a disservice to the cause by trying to pull in converts with a bad movie.

The Day After Tomorrow is rated PG-13 for intense situations of peril and is currently playing at the Regal Cinema in Boone.