Release Date: May 28, 2004
Starring: Dennis Quaid, Jake Gyllenhaal, Emmy Rossum, Ian Holm, Sela Ward
Directed by: Roland Emmerich
Written by: Roland Emmerich, Jeffrey Nachmanoff
Distributed by: 20th Century Fox Films
MPAA Rating: PG-13 (intense situations of peril)
In interviews before the release of the natural disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow, the director, Roland Emmerich, said that he was squeezed into an unlikely dilemma: he had to make his catastrophes -- tornadoes, hurricanes, tidal waves, snowstorms, and myriad other severe climatic phenomena -- look realistic. Apparently present-day audiences have become so attuned to the imaginary world dreamt up in dozens of other disaster movies by Hollywood special effects artists that there is now a clamoring, nay, an insistence that when New York City is nearly swallowed by a massive ocean swell and then frozen over to begin the dawn of a new Ice Age, such disasters should still conform to our unapocalyptic parameters of believability.
The result is a curiously restrained and humdrum disaster movie. Emmerich is no stranger to the genre -- he created perhaps one of its finest staples in 1996’s Independence Day -- but, perhaps in a heady rush of post-September 11 existentialism, he has here sought to infuse all of the chaos and destruction with a grim, humanistic justification. It’s as if he doesn’t feel comfortable unleashing the ravaging potential of his special effects crew until he has thrown some personal drama on the screen, however shlocky or ill-conceived.
The personal drama involves Dennis Quaid as Jack Hall, a paleoclimatogist (which ranks pretty high on the movie industry’s list of obscure professionals who will never fail to find their way into the center of a disaster of unthinkable scale) who has a theory that, in short, says global warming is going to get a lot worse than we think a lot sooner than we think. Needless to say, no one quite believes him, at least until it’s too late. Then, for almost no apparent reason, other than for the sake of the two-hour disaster movie that follows, giant storm systems hundreds of miles across overtake the Earth, slinging hail on Tokyo, tornadoes on Los Angeles, and tidal waves on New York City.
Jack, fortunately, is in Washington, D.C., at the time, although when the storm hits, his son Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal) is trapped in New York. Despite a very natural inclination to run, Sam heeds his father’s advice to stay put; what Jack knows is that anyone who gets caught in the storm’s massive eye will freeze to death within minutes.
Still, the movie needs some kind of plot, and it is at this point that Emmerich discovers what many others in Hollywood who have taken shots at this genre already know: it is very difficult to tell a story with a natural disaster in the background, because not only does the disaster inevitably take center stage, but -- unlike alien attack movies, such as Independence Day or Stargate, which Emmerich also directed -- the only way to stop the unknown, malevolent force is to let it run its course. Anyone who has seen Volcano, Deep Impact, or Dante’s Peak will agree that, over the space of two hours, this can be kind of boring, but Emmerich, directing from a script he co-wrote with Jeffrey Nachmanoff, takes his stab at making it exciting anyway: While everyone is evacuating south to escape the arctic temperatures, Jack decides he will head north to New York to save Sam and anyone else he can find there.
But this journey is strangely anticlimactic and completely devoid of suspense -- the characters and the actors don’t look as though they care how it turns out. Quaid seems to regard his position in the film as a trial to be endured, the sort of crummy blockbuster that A-list actors occasionally have to make in order to keep themselves relevant. And Gyllenhaal sleepwalks through his part, barely deigning to put feeling into a hackneyed romance with a young woman played with just as little feeling by Emmy Rossum. Other characters include a British professor played by Ian Holm -- one of the few characters who supports Jack’s radical theory at the outset -- and Jack’s wife, played by Sela Ward, but none of them has very much screen time, and it’s hard to get attached to these characters, anyway, because there is always the nagging feeling that they could go at any minute.
The Day After Tomorrow, clearly, is a movie that was banking on its special effects, and it will be up to audiences to determine just how unrealistically real the tornadoes, tidal waves, and snowstorms are. Plausibility aside, there isn’t much to be said for the effects themselves, which make the almost complete destruction of Western civilization look like a cut-rate video game, and the few shots that do bear semblance to the real world, like the flooding of New York City, have, in less than a decade’s worth of filmmaking, already become clichéd within the genre.
At least, with this movie, Emmerich has reached the apex of the natural-disaster pyramid. In Hollywood there is always pressure to do more, and to do it bigger and louder than before, so the only way for Emmerich to go up from here is to start destroying entire galaxies and universes. Rather more likely is that he will be forced to reinvent himself, which is probably a good thing, because when a director gets to stressing about the realism of his cataclysmic tidal waves, he has likely lost touch with reality altogether.
-- Craig Roush (craigroush@hotmail.com)