The Day After Tomorrow

When I was thinking of seeing this film, I kept calling it Independence Day. Granted, the two titles share a word, but I'm pretty sure I mix them up because they're both written and directed by disaster-flick impresario Roland Emmerich. And they're the same film. OK, not really, but there's sappy, flag-waving patriotism in both. The difference in this flick is that he takes the U.S. down a teeny notch by making it depend on other nations and recognize that it was wrong. (Gasp!) The plot revolves around a climatologist's realization that abrupt climate change, and therefore a new ice age, will happen within weeks instead of hundreds of years, resulting in him trying to convince the government of the danger and rescue his son in NYC at the same time. I give it the stars I do because the special eff ects are neat-o. (The swamping of the Statue of Liberty is especially nicely done.) Big however, though -- it has an asinine plot involving a Scottish scientist (what is Ian Holm doing in this dreck?), seemingly deliberately poor acting on the part of Dennis Quaid as the climatologist, abrupt scene changes designed only to keep you from falling asleep in your seats between special effects, and some of the most absurd science ever put on film. My fave is the idea that super-cold air could be pulled down from the troposphere so quickly as to freeze humans in their tracks. They predate this nonsense with a scene of kids looking at a Natural History Museum diorama of a mammoth who was found with food still in its mouth, the hypothesis being that he was frozen that way AND that this happened because of the onset of a new ice age. Horsepucky! Such abrupt change is virtually impossible (see the MSNBC report The Science, and Fiction, of Day After Tomorrow). BUT, I'm not disputing that climate change is a real problem. If all this film does is make more of the public aware of the dangers of driving SUVs, then I'm all for it and as many clones of it as Hollywood can put out.

year: 2004
length: 124 min.
rating: 2.0
IMDB link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0319262/combined