 |
 |
Big, Dumb Day Is OK
But what about the day after that?
by Scott McNutt
In The Day After Tomorrow, humankind battles overwhelming visual and special effects. The humans lose, but that won’t stop audiences from oohhhing and ahhhing the f/x. Perhaps audiences will also respond to the movie’s message about the threat of global warming, but a $125 million, natural-resource-devouring budget makes Day a dubious vehicle for preaching environmental responsibility. Still, as big, dumb, summer-matinee fun goes, The Day After Tomorrow works.
The brave but outclassed humans in Day are led by Dennis Quaid as Jack Hall, a paleoclimatologist whose study of ancient North Pole ice cores supports the seemingly oxymoronic idea that global warming may have propelled the last ice age’s rapid onslaught. Jack’s obsession with his work has caused an estrangement with his oncologist wife, Lucy (Sela Ward), and scholarly son, Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal).
Jack’s latest warnings about the melting of the northern ice cap are pooh-poohed by the U.S. government but given credence by crusty old Dr. Rapson (Ian Holm). Rapson discovers that the melting polar ice has caused a warm northern ocean current to suddenly shift south, precipitating an alarming drop in the North Atlantic’s overall temperature. Rapson continues working at his base on the southern coast of Scotland as Jack renews his efforts to convince Washington that danger is imminent. Meanwhile, Lucy is somewhere caring for a brave young cancer patient, and Sam is flying to an academics competition in New York City with science nerd Jason (Dash Mihok) and unknowing love interest Laura (Emmy Rossum).
Then climatic havoc breaks loose, as Jack’s theories are borne out with unexpected speed and on an unimaginable scale. Worldwide, natural disasters strike. An army of tornadoes levels Los Angeles in a Sodom-and-Gomorrah-like ecstasy of destruction. In New York, a titanic flood traps Sam, his friends and the usual motley assortment of underdeveloped characters in the Manhattan Public Library. Even worse, a continent-sized, hurricane-like super-storm sends temperatures in Scotland plummeting to minus 150 degrees Fahrenheit in a matter of minutes, flash-freezing anyone caught outdoors and dooming Dr. Rapson and his assistants to the same fate, eventually.
Before communications are cut, Rapson sends Jack terrifying data: Similar storms are forming over North America and Asia. Within a week, the entire Northern Hemisphere will be buried under a sheet of ice. With billions of innocent people about to die, Jack leaps into action. He calls Lucy and professes his undying love for her, then slaps on his snowshoes and treks to New York to be with his stranded son and prove once and for all that he is not an absentee father.
Such unlikely character decisions are writer and director Roland Emmerich’s way of inserting a human dimension in The Day After Tomorrow’s global catastrophe. Billions will die; but Jack will show he’s a good dad, Dr. Lucy will stick by her brave young cancer patient, and will Sam or won’t Sam tell Laura he loves her? Billions will die, but audiences should concern themselves with only the tribulations of the Hall family and their immediate associates.
Despite having characters whose motivations are slap and dash, the cast is game, especially Quaid, Holm (of whom we see far too little) and Gyllenhaal. It is Emmerich’s calibration of the human scale, which appears to be based mostly upon the barest melodramatic benchmarks, that fails them.
The crew behind the scenes succeeds in depicting the most realistic-looking disasters possible. Soccer-ball-sized hailstones created by the special effects department smash into downtown Tokyo with visceral immediacy, aided by the sound department’s excellent work. The visual-effects department’s post-production CGIs, such as the monstrous waves that drown New York, are harrowing to behold. Production design, art direction, music score—Emmerich blends all these elements for a film that looks, sounds, and “feels” real on an epic scale.
But Emmerich, who has cinematically destroyed great swaths of civilization before, in Independence Day and Godzilla, is once again unable to mesh his end-of-the-world-sized special effects with a realistic, human-sized story. None of the true suffering such devastation would wreak—slow death from disease, exposure, starvation—appears on screen. The conflicts that would inevitably ensue, as survivors battled over remaining natural resources, are not depicted either. Indeed, the movie is highly optimistic about humanity’s ability to cooperate, as Third-World nations open their borders to their newly pauperized First-World neighbors. Oh, sure.
Nonetheless, human moments that do work in the film tend to be rooted in this spirit of optimism and cooperation. The dedication of Rapson’s little team of researchers, who continue to work in the face of their own inevitable fate and quietly offer up toasts as the power fails, is touching. A brief scene in which a homeless man teaches a rich kid the street method of clothes insulation works better than Jack’s time-consuming cross-country trek. In The Day After Tomorrow, it’s the little scenes and the big effects that work. As summer-matinee entertainment goes, that’s enough.
June 3, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 23
© 2004 Metro Pulse
|
|
