[Retro Review]: THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW
First published in May 2004 on Filmrot, I’m bringing over a lot of my back catalogue just because of a couple of praiseworthy e-mails I’ve had regarding some of the older reviews I’ve made public here on StalePopcorn. This is going to be made available on the ‘Main Page’ for twenty-four hours and then it’ll be archived in our Reviews Archive found at the bottom left of the page. Hope you enjoy the ‘flash-back’. 
So the summer blockbuster season is underway. Spider-Man 2 and Shrek 2 are still to come – and as excited as one can get about them (especially the return of Spider-Man) you just know that neither of them can fail in the style of, say last year’s Tomb Raider 2 or Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle. So whilst you anticipate them, you’re not necessarily winding yourself up with worry over whether they will be great or not. You just know that with early word so extremely strong on both (third parts have been announced for both franchises off the back of the sequels – before either has taken a single dollar!) they just aren’t going to suck! But where does that leave the rest of the summer slate?
Uma drew her sword early and killed Bill, Van Hesling came along and set the season off to a terrible start what with it being a movie so desperate to entertain, so needy for your attention that it threw every single conceivable plot exposition, special effects shot and action possibility at you with a complete disregard to coherence or intelligence. Then there was Troy which – whilst entertaining – just came across as movie-making by committee minus any heart. Orlando for the young ladies? Check! Brad for the older ladies? Check! Titanic-style tragic romance against the backdrop of adversary? Check! Good, now something for the blokes – have we got Lord of the Rings style battles but in daylight? Yes, good! Gorgeous ladies? Three? That’ll do. And so on and so forth…
My money was on The Day After Tomorrow. I love a good disaster movie – when it is done well. As a big fan of the genre, I begrudge Hollywood telling me it is “back in vogue” and then throwing the likes of Dante’s Peak at me and expecting me to be happy. I’ve followed this movie from the start – not just the start of production either! I was there right back when Roland Emmerich bought up the rights to the book The Coming Global Superstorm and started talking it up as his next movie. This was back in 2002! Tidal waves smashing into New York City? Four to five tornados tearing Los Angeles to strips? A new ice age? All in one movie? I was so there! When I got an e-mail from a friend who works with 20th Century Fox UK telling me casting had begun I was praying Emmerich was going to do a bit better then Bill Pullman and Randy Quaid! He aimed higher – deciding to fill the movie with solid character actors instead of A-list stars – and as a result landed Donnie Darko himself and Randy’s older, more talented brother Dennis.
To say I was excited about seeing this movie was an under statement. I drove five miles out of my way a good few days before the showing just to make sure we got tickets. I forced my (very patient and loving) girlfriend to go to the cinema extra early just to make sure we didn’t miss anything at all because of queues [and her tendency to deliberate at the Ben and Jerry’s counter for what seems like forty five minutes]. Anyway, I digress. To cut a long introduction short, as the lights dimmed and the movie started I looked at my girlfriend and whispered, “I’ll be so gutted if this doesn’t work!”
Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid) is a climatologist who is obsessed with his job to the extent that it has cost him his marriage to his doctor wife (Sela Ward) and estranged him from his son Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal). The movie opens with him and his two colleagues working out in the Antarctic when an ice shelf collapses around them, nearly costing Hall Senior his life. Soon after a handful of freakish incidents of extreme weather conditions break out across the world yet fail to register on the out-dated government radar, because the “evil” Vice President and “easily manipulated” President haven’t been investing in the environmental program! Just as Sam lands in New York for the weekend on a school trip with the girl of his dreams (the gorgeous and hugely talented Emmy Rossum), the proverbial shit hits the global fan: Tokyo is smashed to pieces with giant hailstones, England is hit with rapid snow fall of fifteen feet an hour and sub-zero temperatures that can take out RAF helicopters, LA is savaged by four tornados and, worst of all – especially for Sam and his lady love – New York is drowned by tidal waves that instantly freeze over forcing survivors to seek refuge in the city’s public library. Realising that the US government are woefully ill equipped to deal with the situation, Jack decides to face the ‘new ice age’ head on and go rescue his son!
The Day After Tomorrow is an extremely well made, hugely enjoyable film. It is a thoroughly entertaining couple of hours beautifully shot in a manner that makes you question whether tragedy should look this gorgeous! I’m not going to be one of those reviewers that bring 9-11 into discussion alongside this movie. I think that has been covered enough and, in all honesty, I think it would be too trite of me to try and discuss it within the confines of this review. Anyone who ‘enjoyed’ the eerie beauty of a submerged New York City in the final act of Steven Spielberg’s A.I will get much better ‘visual kicks’ from the aerial shots of waves ploughing their way through the city blocks with reckless abandonment – not to mention the “poster shot” of Hall and his co-worker walking underneath a battered and frozen Statue of Liberty and into the white, frozen wonderland of the city itself.
The film, despite various blemishes, did not let me down and just as it started entering into territory that could do so, it very kindly wrapped itself up and brought itself to a close. You could pick the film to pieces if you wanted to (like every blockbuster I suppose) and I’ll get to my “issues” later on but the fact is I wanted this film to thoroughly entertain me and not have me stepping out of my viewing experience to groan at clunky dialogue or plot points etc. like Van Hesling had me doing. As excited as I was to see this, I only asked for a seven out of ten entertainment experience. It gave me an eight!
Watching this film you can see that Mr Emmerich is not stepping too far from the Independence Day template that made him and Fox very rich! The set up is identical (a slow, tense multi-story build up), the characterisation similar (singular anti-authority voice struggling to get his voice heard, small band of quirky survivors etc.) and the landmark destruction notched up (Statue of Liberty slammed by a giant wave, New York flooded, Hollywood Sign tore to pieces – it all beats the obliteration of the White House in ID4 hands down!). But here’s the crunch – Emmerich has cast aside both his ego and his producing partner, Dean Devlin (allegedly the two most detrimental things in his career advancement), and decided not to attempt pasting over the gaping movie-capsizing cracks or ignoring constructive criticism offered to them like he did with Godzilla. He’s actually worked hard on this, turning the weaknesses in the genre into strengths (well – most of the time!). The gung-ho alien-fighting Presidential party of ID4 and the sly-swipe-at-Roger-Ebert-masked-as-a-government-figure in Godzilla have actually been replaced. Here Emmerich goes to great lengths to subtly (and I never thought I’d use that word in a Roland Emmerich movie) point the finger at the US government and their cavalier attitude. Furthermore, he’s gathered a cast of great actors together and, whilst the script isn’t exactly going to win any awards or is that particularly strong for that matter, the actors are talented enough to work through it. It’s testament to the much under appreciated talent of Dennis Quaid that he say a line like “We’ve brought the Atlantic to critical desalination point!” and actually make you gasp with concern, when really you don’t have a ‘Scooby-Doo’ what a bloody desalination point is!
Remember when Vivica A. Fox’s character and the President’s wife had those “touching” moments around the camp fire in ID4 and you had to keep slapping yourself in the head to stop your eyes rolling back into your sockets? Well Tomorrow gives us Jack’s Doctor wife (Sela Ward) and a subplot about a terminally ill boy without an ambulance to evacuate him. The old Emmerich would have wrung this for everything he could have got. The new Emmerich keeps it subtle, directs it well and presents two extremely touching performances from Sela Ward and the young boy. It shouldn’t work and if it didn’t I would be the first to complain about it because I hate those sort of emotionally manipulative moments in movies. But the fact is it is a tender, well executed moment in the movie that although sugary sweet is short enough not to cause too much damage!
Anyone going into the film expecting two hours of carnage in the style represented in the movie’s destruction-heavy trailer(s) will admittedly be disappointed. Whilst the flooding of New York is a breath-taking, edge-of-the-seat sequence and, by my prediction, one of the year’s best movie moments, it is only ten or fifteen minutes of the film. What The Day After Tomorrow is actually offering is a study of survival in the aftermath of Mother Nature’s madness not, however, a two hour special effects portfolio of her ability to create mayhem (although the first act condenses two hours worth of carnage into it!). Again, it is testament to the work of Quaid and Jake Gyllenhaal that whilst their characters aren’t the most fully evolved, we do actually care for them and their plight. When Sam stands up to beg the survivors not to leave the confines of the library and venture outside, we sense his desperation and fear not because of any great dialogue etc. but because of what he conveys through simple expressions and glances. Gyllenhaal could have switched on to autopilot for his first foray into “blockbuster” territory but he doesn’t. He invests as much into the slight character of Sam Hall as he did in Mr Darko, and the film is all the better for it.
The film is by no means a modern classic though. It has considerable flaws but it’s enthusiasm to entertain and the extremely talented manner in which Emmerich puts it all together masks over a lot of them in a way that Independence Day and, to a much worse extent, Godzilla failed to do: A lot of the movements of the plot feel a little ‘clunky’ (Sam’s girl cuts her leg early on then forgets about it right up until it is required later on to move the plot along, an ocean liner grinds through Manhattan and comes to a stop outside of the library for no other reason then for it to be used as the setting for a treacherous reconnaissance mission) and Jack’s dangerous trek is under played. Five minutes into it he loses his best friend, ten minutes in he climbs inside a tent, which holds up in the middle of the storm. I’m not that up on the geography of America but I can imagine that a walk from Washington D.C to New York City would be pretty perilous at the best of times let alone in the middle of a global super storm. We don’t really get sucked into Jack’s journey – but we should, because this is what the very heart of the movie is. And as for the CGI wolves? Please, don’t get me started. If they were absolutely necessary to the film (which believe me they are not) I’d rather have put Jake Gyllenhaal’s life on the line by having him chased by real bloodthirsty wolves then I would by the computer graphic abominations that grace this film.
Also because it’s a “modern” take on the disaster genre we are still, no matter how hokey it really is, having to endure those painful ‘outrunning the elements’ moments that seem to be in every movie of it’s type. Going outside the genre, remember how stupid it was in The Mummy Returns when Brendan Fraser out ran the sun’s beam to get inside the temple? Then remember such modern disaster movie moments like Vivica A. Fox’s dog out running an explosion in ID4? Or Jean Reno and company in Godzilla simply driving really fast in a yellow cab and out running the giant iguana? What about Pierce Brosnan simply putting his foot down on the accelerator in Dante’s Peak and out running lava for God’s sake? Towards the end of The Day After Tomorrow Emmerich has the big “eye of the storm” super freeze hit and his character’s just out run it and get instead as everything around them freezes up. Quaid’s character convientently dives under ground in advance and sets up his tent. The film had me captured and I was really buying into the whole thing up until Sam Hall screams “Quick shut the doors!” Yes mate, that is really going to help you. It’d be like hitting a rotweiller with a fresh steak!
But don’t let these flaws put you off the film. It certainly didn’t ruin my enjoyment of it. Some of the more dafter ones surprisingly enhance the enjoyment factor. In fact, I think – flaws and all – there are going to be a lot of people (especially the Independence Day haters) out there that are going to be surprised at how genuinely good this film actually is and how far Emmerich has moved on since the days of ID4 and Godzilla. The first hour is an absolute cracker and it fades it to a pleasurable enough second. Just as Jack starts pontificating in his tent about “making a difference” and the President gives his Jerry Bruckheimer/Michael Bay style speech, you think that Emmerich has kept Tomorrow on the boil for too long and it is all going to go down the toilet… but he pulls the rug from underneath you with an abrupt finish there and then that might leave the odd audience member smarting. If this were Michael Bay he would have had a space mission conclusion with a giant ray firing down enough heat to be able to melt all that nasty snow and right all the wrongs. But this is the new-improved Roland Emmerich and he leaves us in the more pessimistic position of still being royally fucked, but with ‘hope’ on our sides! Quite brave for a $150 million summer blockbuster if you ask me.
After the misfire that was Van Hesling and the all-round, middle-of-the-road entertainment that was Troy, The Day After Tomorrow is a great blockbuster ride that has set the standard for the rest of the season. It is the first genre addition in a long time that will have no trouble whatsoever in standing alongside the likes of The Poseidon Adventure or The Towering Inferno in the years to come. A bit more of Jack Hall and his “man on a mission” stuff and less of Sam Hall and his running around a ship with wolves, and this could have been the movie of the year. As it stands, it’s an underdog contender! Which, twelve months ago, was the same position that Pirates of the Caribbean stood in – and that hasn’t done too badly!
Definitely more a tsunami style crushing wave of entertainment then a piddling splish-splash!
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