director
Roland Emmerich
screenwriters
Roland
Emmerich
Jeffrey Nachmanoff
story by
Roland Emmerich
producers
Roland Emmerich
Mark Gordon
cinematographer
Ueli Steiger
music
Harald Kloser
editor
David Brenner
cast
Dennis Quaid (Jack Hall)
Jake Gyllenhaal (Sam Hall)
Emmy Rossum (Laura Chapman)
Dash Mihok (Jason Evans)
Jay O. Sanders (Frank Harris)
Sela Ward (Dr. Lucy Hall)
Austin Nichols (J.D.)
Arjay Smith (Brian Parks)
Tamlyn Tomita (Janet Tokada)
Sasha Roiz (Parker)
Ian Holm (Terry Rapson)
Perry King (President Blake)
Kenneth Welsh (Vice President Becker)
mpaa rating: PG-13
running
time: 124m
u.s.
release: May 28, 2004
video
availability: TBA
official
website
other roland
emmerich films
reviewed on this website:
- godzilla
- independence
day
- the
patriot
- stargate
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The problem with large-scale
disaster movies (as opposed to smaller-scale ones like The
Poseidon Adventure) is that we're given a few people to care
about, out of presumably millions of lives. If tornadoes are
tearing L.A. apart and a gigantic wave is turning New York City
into an aquarium, who cares whether some guy rescues his teenage
son? We might care if the characters were written with some panache
and skill, but The Day After Tomorrow, political posturing
notwithstanding, is all about the spectacle. In the long-shot
views of destruction (most of which you've seen in the trailer),
you watch thousands of people die, but you know most of the people
you've been watching for a few scenes are going to live. A truly
chilling apocalyptic film like this would dispense with a heroic
narrative altogether and just wreak havoc for two hours, for
mass death would be the meaning of the event for most people.
Director Roland Emmerich follows
exactly the same recipe that paid off lucratively in Independence
Day and less so in Godzilla:
one heaping cup of destruction, a teaspoon of character development,
half a pound of scenes involving our heroes narrowly avoiding
death -- sprinkle CGI effects liberally, let cool, serves millions
of gullible moviegoers (the studio hopes). We have here, too,
a Message: Instead of aliens or Godzilla, this time it's Mother
Nature herself testing our American resolve (we see glimpses
of chaos in other nations, but this film's view is so narrow
you'd think America was composed solely of L.A., N.Y.C., and
Washington). The British at a remote weather station can only
get drunk and await death by freezing; it takes a red-blooded
American, in the person of Dennis Quaid, to fight the odds and
make it to an iced-over Big Apple in search of his son (Jake
Gyllenhaal, a long way from Donnie
Darko).
As usual, Emmerich's direction
is sloppy. A perky brainy girl (Emmy Rossum, from Passionada)
falls ill due to an infected gash on her leg, and Gyllenhaal
(who's nursing a crush on her) and some friends head out to a
Russian ship that has floated into the middle of the city and
frozen there. They're in search of penicillin, which they assume
will be available on a Russian ship in a bottle marked "penicillin"
in English (and, wonder of wonders, it is!). En route, they run
into a pack of nasty timber wolves that have gotten loose from
the city zoo; they also got loose from the film's CGI artists
before they could be made remotely realistic-looking (for a second
I thought I was watching Van
Helsing again). Then we cut away to Quaid or some other
business, and when we next see the sick girl, she's feeling much
better. Emmerich doesn't give us the moment when Gyllenhaal makes
it back and the girl gets the penicillin -- the very point
of this entire outlandish sequence. And don't even get me started
on the hilarity of the scene where a bunch of people outrun
a blast of freezing air and close the doors on it. What,
does the air see the closed doors and shuffle away, sniffling
dejectedly? We've just seen that same air stop three helicopters
in flight by turning chopper fuel to ice, for Christ's
sake.
One moment in the bloated spectacle
pleased me greatly: at the New York Public Library, where Gyllenhaal
and some other survivors hole up, two librarians -- a fussy dusty
stereotyped one and a funky earthy-crunchy type more typical
of who librarians are these days -- debate whether to toss the
works of Nietzsche onto the fire that's going to be warding off
the impending freeze. A literary discussion in a big-budget
summer apocaflick? I couldn't believe my ears; Emmerich must've
been off taking a piss when that was written and filmed. Elsewhere,
the movie's respect for the written word -- and for credible
science (yes, we're ruining the planet, but an overkill movie
like this doesn't help the credibility of actual environmentalists
one whit) -- is typified by dialogue like "Unpack the snowshoes
-- we're walking from here" or the film's final line, the
most unintentionally funny punchline since "Somewhere in
heaven there's an angel with big ears" in The Tall Guy.
The librarians should've tossed the script onto the fire first.
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