Roland Emmerich is no Irwin Allen.
Allen is the man behind such disaster classics as The Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure, and he knew the rules of the genre (he should, he created them): give the disaster center stage, stuff the cast with celebrities, put their tongues firmly in their cheeks, and let the audience play the guess-which-stars-won't-make-it game.
Oh yes, and distract people from the gaping plot holes by immersing them in SENSURROUND.
The Day After Tomorrow had pretty computer graphics, but no Sensurround and thus nothing to distract me from the horrendous performances of virtually everyone in the cast, the laughable dialogue, and the absurd plotting. And almost none of the main characters die. What's up with that? What's the point of a disaster movie where you can't wager in a death pool?
There's only one reason anyone enters the theater for this film: to see Mother Nature get paleozoic on our ass. And we get some good carnage early on as Los Angeles turns into The Wizard of Oz gone postal. But after that the film lapses into tepid melodrama about a family relationship that fails to engage the viewer on even a superficial emotional level, unless you've got X chromosomes and are inexplicably hot for Jake Gyllenhaal. There's a great wide shot as a tidal wave rocks New York, the water rushing through the city grid, but I wanted more. I wanted a flurry of scenes showing walls of water barreling through streets, of landmarks being washed away. I wanted ground's-eye views of oncoming doom. Instead the film has tunnelvision, focusing almost exclusively on Gyllenhaal and friends.
The Day After Tomorrow plays against an enormous canvas, but shows us only a tiny corner. The characters seem largely oblivious to the staggering death toll. Scenes of Americans desperately crossing the Rio Grande into Mexico come off as unintentionally funny. Where were the riots, the world-is-ending bacchanals, the global perspective of the chaos? There were many interesting stories that could have been told. What they picked wasn't one of them.
I also think it's a truism in Hollywood that if your script involves a pack of wild wolves attacking teenagers inside a frozen Russian cargo ship, you could probably use another rewrite.
Posted by Peter at May 28, 2004 03:38 PMI don't mean to nitpick, but don't you mean to say that we want to see Mother Nature get Paleozoic on our ass? ;)
Posted by: Jake on May 28, 2004 03:53 PMOoh, that's better. I've stolen it.
[was: "...get medieval on our ass"]
Posted by: Peter Sarrett on May 28, 2004 04:06 PMWell... these are the same folks who gave us Independance Day and a remake of Godzilla.
Both had good trailers. Both movies were pretty weak.
During his presidential campaign, Bob Dole announced that Independance Day was a terrific movie he would recommend to all. Later, it came out that he never actually saw the film.
Posted by: Russell on May 28, 2004 04:40 PMYour review is spot on. TDAT failed in all the ways a disaster flick shouldn't. And speaking as one who doesn't go for cgi spectaculars, I was fairly impressed with that aspect of the film. I do like what Jake Gyllenhaal said about the script, though (http://imdb.com/news/wenn/#2). I shudder to think what would happed if he hadn't done what he did.
And can I say, why the hell was the Russian cargo ship floating down the streets of New York, anyway? Because it helped further the plot? Because it could? I still don't know.
All in all, at least it was better than Godzilla - one of the worst derivative dog turds ever made.
Posted by: Nathan Beeler on May 29, 2004 12:58 PMMy biggest complaint was the sheer outlandishness. Part of the fun of a disaster movie is when the premise is at least partly believable. But in this movie, the Vice President not only admits to making a mistake, but actually apologizes for it!! Puh-leaze.
The global warming thing sounded plausible though.
Posted by: Dugrless on June 1, 2004 09:44 AMDidja notice? In a Twentieth Century Fox film, except for about 3 or 4 cutaways to the Weather Channel (including, inexplicably, the (vice) president's oh-so-soulful mea culpa) every pseudo-feed was from a Fox affiliate, or in Europe, from Rupert Murdoch's SkyNews. With one other exception. During the isn't-it-ironic shutdown of the Mexican border, the two reporters had a CBS and an ABC logo plastered on their microphones. Ha ha ha, bet those liberals are laughing now. I usually take with a grain of salt all the liberal media vs. right-wing corporate media bashing, but something so creepily insidious as that does give me pause.
Best groaner for me personally: The Statue of Liberty is so fragile they only let one person at a time climb up the arm to do maintenance. Yet it not only survives of multistory-high wall of water, but then tons of ice and snow.
Oh well, I was in a pissed-off mood anyway and wanted a bunch of CGI destructo effects, so I got what I paid for.
Posted by: Mark on June 3, 2004 09:47 PM