I’ve been reading a lot of Shakespeare lately, both his work and writing about his work. So why not find something that is basically mindless entertainment trying to be? As it is, HBO has director Roland Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow until the end of the month, so why not take a look at it?
I mean, I refuse to watch Emmerich’s Anonymous, but there are other movies pretending to be deep on the man’s resume. Might as well check one out while I still can.
Climatologist Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid) has made a startling discovery: global warming might actually cause another ice age. There’s some science involved, namely something to do with arctic and antarctic ice throwing off the world’s warm ocean currents, but he doesn’t see this effect happening for at least another century. Sure, the current Vice President, a man bearing more than a causal resemblance to Dick Cheney, doesn’t want to ruin the economy or some such in a series of lines that don’t sound at all familiar at this particular point in human history, no sir. But even Jack doesn’t see the harm in dropping his moody son Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal) off at the airport to fly from Washington to New York for a high school academic competition of some kind.
But then it turns out Jack was mostly right in his theory. He was just off on the time scale. What should have taken decades happens in just a few days as the weather goes haywire, a massive hurricane of cold weather swamps the Northern hemisphere, and Emmerich’s trademark destruction hits. Los Angeles gets smashed by mammoth tornadoes while New York get a tidal wave, flooding the island of Manhattan, and then things start to get very, very cold.
So, this being an Emmerich movie, I knew better than to expect well-developed characters that I could grow to care about. Most of the time, the best you can hope for from an Emmerich movie is a character played by an actor who can at least plug his or her own well-developed onscreen persona into it, something that, say, Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum both able to do. Here we have a cast that includes the likes of Quaid, Gyllenhaal, Ian Holm, Emmy Rossum, and Sela Ward, and the only one of that group that seems to have anything of a distinctive character is Gyllenhaal as a moody, quirky teenager.
But audiences, if they do tune in, don’t tune into an Emmerich movie for the characters so much as they do the destructive spectacle that is to follow. Part of me wonders what Emmerich has against New York and L.A. at this point, but there is a lot of his requisite destruction that probably killed a lot of people, but like many of his movies, there don’t seem to be too many corpses lying around afterwards, and most of the victims are not characters we’ve seen much of up to that point. Instead, we’ll get the more colorful people with lines surviving against all odds, especially the homeless man and his dog.
However, Emmerich here is ostensibly trying to say something serious about climate change. He’s not the only filmmaker to do so, but he may be the only one with a movie where the destruction is caused by science that seems a bit more questionable than most. Gyllenhaal’s Sam and two friends at one point run from cold sweeping across the area they’re in in a manner that probably wouldn’t look any less ridiculous than running from whatever the trees were spreading in The Happening. Even if an ice age is possible under climate change, I somehow doubt we could get one within a two week period as depicted here. Dubious science isn’t going to help spread a message.
Then again, this is a movie where an American president admits to being wrong and the weather is so cold it kills humans but not a loose pack of wolves. Maybe this isn’t the sort of movie you should be thinking about regardless.
Grade: C
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