Ice, Ice, Baby
Mother Nature gets a little bitchy in Roland Emmerich's latest monument smashing disaster pic, The Day After Tomorrow.
The Upside: See director Roland Emmerich tie together just about every disaster movie ever made into one economical package.
The Downside: Once the meteorological fireworks are over, it's a pretty long slog through the snow.
Face the fact, nature doesn't make for a good villain in any kind of popcorn chomping movie spectacle. Oh, sure, the 1970s were just about defined by movies showing what happens when Discovery Channel fodder goes completely bats***, but like an SUV in an oil crunch they burned through just about any creative space that could come from stories in which recycled archetypes are offed one-by-one by the environmental flavor-of-the-month, whether it be volcanoes or earthquakes or swarms of really POed killer bees. But we're not talking about books like Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air (about an exhibition to the top of Mt. Everest that was doomed when bad weather set in) which didn't position the weather as much as an adversary, rather as a foil that proved insurmountable to human physical weakness. No, the mistake that movies like The Day After Tomorrow make is trying to squeeze the dynamism of the environmental world into the black-and-white thinking of simplistic adventure stories. What the hell does that mean? It means it is hard to get worked up when the "bad guy" in a one-dimensional movie like this has no face, no identity, and does nothing with any reason- it simply does what it does.
It's a heady contrast to the summer smash-em-up that put Roland Emmerich on the map, 1996's seminal Independence Day which not only worked as a disaster movie, but one with a big ole smiley face pinned to its sleeve. And for a movie in which any kind of emotional or moral complexity was an extinct species, ID4 took advantage of its "special" nature by making its heroes funny, larger-than-life and its villains instantly hissable, only proving that if you're going to enjoy schlock, you might as well dive in whole-hog. The Day After Tomorrow borrows a lot from ID4 (Emmerich's two forgettable films that came in between, Godzilla and The Patriot, are wisely, well, uh, forgotten) in throwing together a group of characters who could only be considered 'unique' in a B-list screenwriter's mind, a few emotional situations that are as old as dirt, and some special effects that make short work of plenty of national monuments (say goodbye to the Hollywood sign!). But while millions die in the first hour alone, Tomorrow can't provide much hope for the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat turns out to be the movie's strongest selling point.
The plotline, as it is, is pieced together by random coincidences and people not noticing the writing on the wall, even when it is 20-feet tall. In the opening a part of the Antarctic ice shelf breaks off- coincidentally right in front of the tent of paleoclimatologist (okay, now you're making that up...) Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid, who looks like he wants to go back and kick the crap out of Santa Ana all over again). Pretty soon, it has begun to snow in India, hail the size of bricks falls in Japan, and Los Angeles is completely wiped out by a series of tornadoes- all paving the way for the inevitable chuckler of a line when someone asks, "Do you think all of these events are related?"
Of course they are, but if anyone in this movie demonstrated the intelligence of rock salt then Emmerich wouldn't get to make his soap-box platform about how humans are destroying the fragile planet and, more frustratingly, there are even dumber humans who won't do anything about it! Probably the most ironic (translation: stupid) thing about The Day After Tomorrow isn't really about the movie itself. I saw an MSNBC feature earlier that described it as the "most controversial movie of the summer." Really? To who? The basics of global warming (which trigger the Extreme Weather Channel events in the film) have become foundations in scientific fact, but already reactionary conservatives are blasting the movie as "junk science." Well, duh... that's why they call it fiction. Criticizing a movie like The Day After Tomorrow for its inaccuracy in depicting global weather is like jumping on Spider-Man for its erroneousness in depicting how human beings can shoot webs and swing from buildings. Anyone who tries to use this film as the basis of a scientific or political argument has a few more cumulonimbuses in the cranium than the average pundit. Consider, just for a second, that much of the 'theory' of the film is based on a book by Whitley Stierber, a man who even conspiracy theorists acknowledge is a few fries short of a happy meal.
The spring-loaded attraction for The Day After Tomorrow are scenes of mass mayhem that, unfortunately, have already been played out ad nauseum in the film's television and preview trailers. Hey, maybe you're the kind of person who gets a kick out of seeing a portion of the Atlantic Ocean go completely Biblical on the island of Manhattan, I don't know. What I do know is that Tomorrow doesn't even have enough of the golly-gees to sustain itself once it reaches its creaky second half. Hall sets off in complete white-out conditions towards New York to find his son, Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal, doing his best Tobey Maguire impersonation) who is trapped in the New York Central Library with a young hottie (Mystic River's Emmy Rossum) and a cast of characters so superfluous that they aren't even provided proper names. Right about this point, Emmerich could have kept things going if he didn't let the age-old fallbacks take over: Elder Hall laments about not being a better father. Younger Hall struggles with telling Laura he loves her while they burn books to stay alive.
And those wolves that escaped from the Central Park zoo earlier in the film... do you really think you're never going to see them again?
I could have enjoyed The Day After Tomorrow on a pure guilty pleasure level the same why I got into Van Helsing, but it is also a movie with a whole lot of precociousness but not a lot of smarts. The moral of the story (wasting natural resources bad, conservation good) is made with hardly any effort early on, but Emmerich sees the need to hammer home the point to even more social ills. Take the homeless man who is repeatably denied shelter when the Big Apple begins to turn into a popsicle. Or the scene where Americans flee south across the Rio Grande river in a photo negative of anti-immigration pictures you could find on Ann Coulter or Michael Savage's website. Or in the last ten minutes when a very, very Dick Cheney-looking Vice President (Kenneth Walsh) speaks on public television and you can practically picture Emmerich waving his finger at you shouting, "Americans... treat our underprivileged nations better!" Everyone can enjoy some summertime silliness, but nobody likes a nag. C