The apocalyptic thriller The Day After Tomorrow opens with a genuinely majestic traveling shot that follows bits and pieces, large and small, of an ice flow back to its source, an ice shelf on the Antarctic continent where three dots that turn out to be a team of men can be observed. Are these the scientists who will be instrumental in saving the human race in the story that is to come? Wait a minute: they're DRILLING. Uh, oh....
But, wait again: one of them is Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid), a climatologist who, with his two colleagues, is taking core samples are part of findings that he will present at an international conference in New Delhi, showing that the polar ice caps have deteriorated to the point where a global warming trend could start and create major changes in the planet's weather. There is some talk about another ice age, some time off, maybe in a hundred years, maybe a thousand. You don't want to start a panic over these things. When Jack steps outside to meet a colleague, Terry Rapson (the indispensable Ian Holm), there is a light snowfall already in progress in New Delhi, and Japan is about to get pelted by chunks of ice falling from the sky. Then the skies darken over Los Angeles....
Previously, the director Roland Emmerich, working with Dean Devlin, brought us Independence Day and a (disastrous) 1998 remake of Godzilla, films which used the sight of mass annihilation and massive destruction in such a way as to stoke the audience and give them something to get-off on, again and again. The Day After Tomorrow takes a (plausible) set up outlining what would happen if the planet was struck by a catastrophic climate change, then goes one step further, showing what would happen if the occurrence took place not over a matter of aeons but over a matter of weeks, even days, from the manifestation of multiple tornados to pressure changes which cause temperatures to plummet in such a way as to flash-freeze everything, just like the mammoth on display at the Natural History Museum in New York City that Jack Hall's son, Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal), takes a gander at before disaster strikes.
Anyone who spent any of their formative years in the Seventies will be reminded, whether they like it or not, of the ghosts of disaster movies past. You know what's going to happen to two characters who exchange dialogue like, "Shouldn't you be monitoring the weather?" "This is L.A. What weather?" Jack's wife, Lucy (Sela Ward), is a pediatrician who must tend after a child who cannot be moved without the aid of an ambulance, a reminder of when Linda Blair grinned-and-beared-it as a medical patient through most of Airport 1975. However, Day After Tomorrow moves gracefully through its multiple plotlines involving Jack, Lucy, and Sam (Gyllenhaal again distinguishes himself, showing how he can slip-across, as if by sideways, a performance that proves ultimately solid and affecting), who, with two friends, is attending an academic decathlon in New York City just before the city is struck by a freak tsunami. There's one beautiful shot of flocks of birds streaming through the skies, and the subsequent images showing Manhattan being swept through and submerged by tidal waters induce in one due amounts of awe and terror.
Review by Gregory Avery · Nitrate Online
