The Day After Tomorrow is the perfect summer movie. It has everything it needs: a high budget, insanely good special effects, an almost non-existent story with a cute girl and some really bad one-liners. I went into this movie only hoping for some really cool special effects of New York City and Los Angeles being trashed. With that in mind, I found this movie to be highly entertaining, except for those few scenes where the actors decided to open their mouths and speak. Who wrote this thing anyway?
Dennis Quad plays Jack Hall, a climatologist who fears that global warming will soon wreak havoc upon the world, though he doesn't expect it to happen so soon. It seems the North Atlantic current is out of whack, and needs to correct itself. When this happens, violent storms appear all over the world. Softball-sized hail crushes cars in Japan. In Los Angeles, massive tornados devestate the city. And in the northern hemisphere, hurricane-like systems begin to form, only they are extremely large, and filled with super-cooled air that freezes anything in an instant. Jack's son, Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal) is in New York as it is smashed with a huge tidal wave, and then frozen over. So being the bad father that he is, never around because of his work, Jack must trek through the storm to rescue his son. This is the premise.
Absurd? Of course it is. Entertaining? Damn right. It's always fun to see the Hollywood sign to get ripped away, or to see New York City being flooded, as a massive ship floats down the streets. It's always fun to see actors playing the Vice President and President that bare a striking resemblance to our actual leaders. Funny, I should think, that these characters are just as uncaring about the environment as the ones in real life. Funny, sad and a little scary.
I doubt there is a real political agenda behind this movie, as it is quite stupid in every other department. Quaid muddles through his role with a furrowed brow, as if he's confused as to why he's in such a crappy movie. It can be seen in his acting, since he really doesn't try very hard. The movie is filled with ridiculous situations, such as a scene where the group of survivors in New York City are trying to outrun the instant freeze, like it's some kind of monster chasing them. It just doesn't seem very realistic, but then again, neither does the premise of this movie.
If you're looking for some summer fun that doesn't involve your brain, look no further. If you want all that flash with some substance to make it a good movie, then you'll have to wait for Spider-Man 2.