The Day After Tomorrow

Hooray! The moment has finally arrived! Moviehouse need hold its breath no longer! Yippee! Of all the many catastrophic side-effects of global warming, possibly the most chilling is the existence of The Day After Tomorrow, climate change having provided Roland Emmerich with another excuse to lay great cities to waste in accordance with the kid-let-loose-on-a-film-set principles he displayed directing Independence Day and Godzilla. Both were unfeasibly massive hits, of course, with ID in particular tapping into a dormant public appetite for massive explosions, zero plotting and cretinous dialogue, and the film tragically kick-started the rejuvenation of the entire disaster-movie genre – cue Volcano, Deep Impact, Armageddon, Twister and a host of other crimes against cinema. Cheers, Roland.
The Day After Tomorrow offers plenty more of the same. You know the premise, obviously: decades of man-made destruction of the environment, chiefly emanating from our friends in the USA, have imperilled the survival of the very planet, and it’s merely a matter of time before melting polar ice-caps give way to far more stark and terrifying manifestations. In short, the planet is fucked. Doomed. Unless several highly unlikely scientific breakthroughs intervene, our descendants are all going to die for the sins of long-dead industrialists. This is a cold, hard fact, which could and should be the premise for hair-raising cinema. Emmerich, of course, manages to render the whole deadly-serious business as dull as humanly imaginable.
He casts the Comeback Kid du jour, Dennis Quaid, as a climatologist whose apocalyptic but accurate forebodings are dismissed by the usual array of charming right-wing White House spooks, before events such as the total annihilation of Los Angeles overtake everyone. From here onward, Quaid’s expertise must save the day, a difficult concept to take seriously: he’s a likeable enough actor, but hardly anyone’s idea of a brilliant scientist. The hitherto credible Jake Gyllenhaal (Donnie Darko) pockets an undoubtedly persuasive paycheque in exchange for a role that doesn’t require actual acting, and the roll of honour also includes such notables as Ian Holm and Adrian Lester.
Scanning around for positives, one is forced to admit that The Day After Tomorrow’s special effects are undoubtedly special and even logistically quite impressive, but this doesn’t make watching them any less tedious. Any viewer with functioning brain cells will be bored beyond the point of coma after two hours of this tripe. If this genuinely is your cup of tea, you like having your intelligence insulted, and you’re reading the wrong film column.
Strictly for the proudly retarded.

123 Mins. Cert 12pg. 0ut now