THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW (2004) A thriller about bad weather - you figure it out It's easy to see why a pitch meeting for this movie would've been a slam dunk. Independence Day was a huge hit, and the one thing everybody remembers liking about it is watching New York and Los Angeles get destroyed. The Day After Tomorrow lets the same director do it again. But didn't they ever ask to see a script? If they had, they might have noticed this: the second half of this movie consists almost entirely of Jake Gyllenhaal burning books to stay warm, and Dennis Quaid walking in the snow. Though frequent collaborator/hack Dean Devlin is not on board this time, this movie tries to recycle many of the things from Emmerich's past works, most notably its lead, as played by Quaid. He combines James Spader's scientist in Stargate (has controversial theories which are ultimately proven right), Randy Quaid in Independence Day (the turbulent relationship with his son to whom he has to prove something), and Bill Pullman in Independence Day (also extranged from his pretty wife, but gets back together with her by the end). Elsewhere, there's a heroic suicide, the pretty wife is a successful professional, ironically misguided protesters, awful things usually happening in the most conspicuous places, and people caught in traffic, getting out of their cars to stare in awe when they should be running like fucking hell. In the spirit of fairness though, these things were pretty common stock items in the first place. And it was nice to see the Capitol Records building get demolished. Har-har - that's for giving Exodus the same A&R guy as Heart! One thing it does not recycle: the teary-eyed flag waving and sunshiney faith that the US government and/or military will fix things for us. Quite to the contrary, this time the US government is mostly represented by a shifty, short-sighted Vice President (Kenneth Welsh) whose only apparent function is to be wrong about everything all the time (Independence Day had one of these too), and even looks more than a bit like Dick Cheney. One thing that's here that was mercifully absent in Independence Day - Star Trek-style technobabble that, as always, means less when you understand it more. Apparently global warming causes the ice age - I seem to remember Dilton in the Archie comics having the same theory. The only plus to this movie of any importance: yes, you get to see Los Angeles destroyed again, this time by tornadoes (five minutes, thirty minutes in). And yes, you get to see New York City destroyed again, this time by a big wave that floods it ten or so floors deep and then freezes over before it recedes (maybe seven minutes, forty-five or so minutes in). Both sequences are a kick, and Emmerich hasn't lost his wry eye for the little oddities of Americana - Independence Day had heat-packing Los Angelinos shooting at mile-wide spacecraft with handguns, and this has Americans fleeing en masse across the Rio Grande into Mexico, who doesn't want the influx of refugees. There are also a few beautiful shots of an Antarctic ice shelf at the beginning, and a frozen NYC at the end (which you saw in the trailer). I like it when movies aren't shy about the snow. That's about it though. Here's the plot, such as it is: the northern hemisphere is frozen while Gyllenhaal is trapped in New York, so his father (Quaid), whose sense of fatherly dutifulness has been bruised by his lateness in picking him up to take him to the airport, vows to walk all the way there from Philadelphia. The question this begs: then what? Walk all the way there and...what, walk back? The nominal climax comes with an agonizingly tedious 30 minutes to go, as Gyllenhaal scrambles aboard a Russian tanker (!) to avoid marauding wolves (!!!). The international-market-pleasing crew of the space station in orbit gets a nice view of the storms from a relatively warm perspective. The Day After Tomorrow bases its catastrophes on a book called The Coming Global Superstorm by known nutcases Art Bell and Whitley Streiber, though the climate cataclysm projected by the book takes place over a significantly longer time than the (apparent) few days this movie is set over. As you might expect, The Day After Tomorrow made an assload of money on its opening weekend and then dropped off the face of the earth, probably due to a marketing trend that has been dominant for some time. Does nobody care about how much a movie makes overall anymore? After the opening weekend movies seem to drop away entirely from public consciousness. Though in this case, you can hardly blame the public. It's everything that sucked about Twister combined with most everything that sucked about Independence Day. If you wish it was 1996 all over again, this movie is for you. BACK TO THE D's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE