The Day After Tomorrow

• Directed, Co-Produced, and Co-Written by Roland Emmerich
• May 17, 2004 (Mexico City) / May 28, 2004 (US)
• Based on the 1999 book The Coming Global Superstorm by Art Bell and Whitley Strieber

A series of weather events caused by global warming lead to severe cooling and a new Ice Age.

As environmental message films go The Day After Tomorrow beats you over the head with its message. It does not shy away from shoving your nose in its message like you would a pet who has messed on the carpet. That it feel more like a lecture than a piece of entertainment or a well-done message film-which it is not. I’m not against message films but when message becomes more important than telling a good story it can get a bit boring. Emmerich is clearly not a director or writer capable of nuance.

The characters in this film are as two dimensional as they come. Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid) is a NOAA paleoclimatologist that is right about everything to the point of very nearly being a prophet. While he doesn’t walk on water in this movie, he does walk on plenty of ice which is frozen water. I guess that is close enough for this white savior.

We get not one but three extraneous female characters that do little more than be there for their respective male counterparts. The first is Dr. Lucy Hall (Sela Ward) who is Jack’s devoted if very neglected wife. She loves him but is still willing to take family vacations without telling him they ever happened. Seriously. She did just that. During the course of the movie she apparently has just one patient that is a tragically sick child. What does this have to do with the coming environmental catastrophe or any particular subplot? Nothing really but it does make Jack seem like a bit of a deadbeat husband and father because they’re both parents to Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal) who is a smarter-than-smart kid with anger management issues because daddy is not around. But back to Lucy. She really has no impact on things. I might feel differently if she went somewhere with Sam or Jack and was a part of their stories but she just acts motherly towards Sick Kid and tell Jack he is a bad dad but she loves him.

Another pointless female character? It’s Sam’s tepid love interest Laura (Emmy Rossum). This young genius (that is not sarcasm. She really is!) suffers a serious injury but does not say a word because that is always smart and not cliché at all. Sam saves her life by risking his life to get penicillin. It’s a little bit of heroics which if you can’t guess he makes it back to his girlfriend by the edge of his teeth. What does she do in the film. Not really much but get sick to make Sam a hero.

And who can forget NASA meteorologist Janet Tokada (Tamlyn Tomita)? She gets to support Jack’s conclusions and disappear until needed to do so again. What dynamic and well-done female characters we have! What is wrong with including a female that contributes to the narrative or excluding a female or two if they do nothing? Otherwise you get tokenism and that is a disservice to the performers.

Director Roland Emmerich clearly had an axe to grind with the Bush Administration in general and Dick Cheney in particular as both the President and Vice President in this film are either modeled after or have a passing resemblance to them. The veep character in particular looks more than a bit like Dick Cheney did when he was healthy and didn’t have a cyborg heart. Talking about being blatantly obvious! And veep turned prez Becker even gets on TV to apologize for not being more environmentally insensitive and for not pushing for better environmental policies. This is after we forgave Latin American debt to the US could flood into Mexico unabated. Again, it shoves your face in the message and tells you what you should think rather than try to lead you to it. It lectures you.

Writing these elements about this movie out the story presented becomes a bit laughable. I should have laughed while watching such a ham-fisted delivery of a message filled with a political wish list of items as parts of the story has. Some reportedly worried about the poor science used in the movie harming the cause of climate activism. More harmful is the plot and its elements as well as the badly crafted characters that lead to a bad story. Audiences will forgive bad science but not a bad story.

If you’re going to have as your basis global warming causing an ice age you need to do a little better job of explaining it than they did here even if the science is bad in order to make it sound plausible. In contrast with their work on Stargate Emmerich does not seem to be able to do that here. Though the series went into more depth, that movie gave you just enough to make it feel like something other than space magic. Here we are just supposed to take it as is.

And it’s really hard to get invested in the characters. There are quite a number of them but none of them are that interesting. One of the elements you need in a disaster movie (which The Day After Tomorrow is) is to be able to care about the characters so that when they die or when they struggle it matters to you and you want to see what comes next but the thing is because they put message before story they failed to do just that. You would be very hard pressed to remember any of their names or care about those you can recall. They are that bland and interchangeable.

Visually this movie is extremely impressive. The displays of storm storms and just general devastation is rather cool and impressive. And the first example of the instantaneous deep freeze is rather shocking. The destruction is what makes this movie worth watching. The dialogue is just a great many scientists basically going we told them we told you so.

As visual spectacles go The Day After Tomorrow is very good if not excellent. As a narrative it’s not that good. If you like to watch lots of destruction then this movie is for you. If you want a little more substance to your viewing experience then move on as it lacks that.