The Day After Tomorrow
written in acid by Ryan Ellis
June 21, 2004
Roland Emmerich is a "cheap gasp" director. He'll resort to any shock
tactic
to make the audience gasp. This is the hack who blew up the White House,
dinobliterated Madison Square Garden, and now tornadoes the Hollywood
sign.
Many people might not think those historical sites are sacred, but
Emmerich
knows he's touching a nerve when he attacks such beloved landmarks. He's
not
a subtle or cerebral director, but there's room for this guy in
Tinseltown.
He makes money. 'Independence Day' and 'The Patriot' are in the
unpublished
movie dictionary under "guilty pleasures that made enough greenbacks to
buy
the Yankees". 'The Day After Tomorrow' will not be in that same fictitious
dictionary. This movie should be flushed down the hopper like so much
Irwin
Allen nonsense.
The disaster flick didn't die after 9/11---as some windbags insisted would
happen---it just got a whole lot stupider. Yeah, baby, we still lust for
destruction, mayhem, and even ultra-violent death in our movies. It helps
if
an aging heartthrob named Dennis Quaid and a young girl-getter named Jake
Gyllenhaal are the stars of the delirium. They play a feuding father and
son, Jack and Sam Hall. Boy-genius Sam treks to the Big Bad Apple on a
class
trip with his fellow smarty-pantses while climatologist Jack has
discovered
that the weather is getting screwy and our on-going environmental rape-job
is a factor. The Dick Cheney VP character (spitting image of the cyborg
himself, but it's really Kenneth Welsh) refuses to listen to what weather
mishaps might happen down the road. A paraphrased line of
dialogue---"there's no time to look at pretty clouds when money is out
there
waiting to be made and/or embezzled." Anyway, against all science, Hall's
predictions start happening immediately. Days later, the entire northern
hemisphere is facing a deep freeze. Right.
Sam and his friends are trapped in a New York library when the Atlantic
Ocean makes an uninvited guest appearance on Manhattan's streets. Tankers
float down the block (another GASP! moment) and it starts to get chilly.
Sample dialogue from a phone conversation between Sam & Jack. "Don't go
outside because the temperatures are plummeting and you'll freeze to
death.
Stay where you are, and I'll come and get you. What? How will I survive
when
I just said that the cold will kill anyone who goes out in it? Because I'm
Dennis Quaid and they can't kill me off, unless it's the final scene. Even
then, I think I'll be riding off into the sunset. So you'll be safe until
then." Okay, I ad-libbed the last 4 or 5 sentences, but you get the idea.
Sure, he's a climate expert who's spent time in the cold, but COME ON!
The movie actually works for a very---very---short while. While I thought
the F/X were sorta sad for a flick with a budget the size of Neptune, the
poster shot of the Statue of Liberty engulfed in a tidal wave and later
buried under snow is eye-catching. But hype can't always sell tripe. The
actors don't seem to want to be doing this movie. Quaid and Gyllenhaal
have
been more interesting while standing on red carpets than they are wading
through this seepage. I'd love to see the looks on their faces when they
saw
the final cut. "Do I really look THAT stupid?" If they're bored, do they
expect us to manufacture some excitement for them? The CG budget must have
left no room for high-priced stars because---as much as I usually like
those
2 actors---they're not headliners who can open just any old movie.
I wonder if Ian Holm heard that Gyllenhaal had signed on before agreeing
to
pander. I suspect our buddy Bilbo Baggins assumed he was making 'Donnie
Darko 2: Frank Freezes The World' and said, "Me too!" Why else would the
classy Holm spend even 5 minutes on such a production, even if he does
phone
in his performance and he's always crammed into a tiny set that might as
well be its own movie? [Same goes for the mature-but-***y Sela Ward and
her
thankless part as Quaid's doctor wife.] In fact, that reminds me of just
how
cramped most of the scenes are. Sure, the weather freak-outs happen in
computer-generated outdoor settings, but it felt like the theatre's
ceiling
was bearing down on me through most of the movie. Then again, theatres in
Toronto have been known to collapse without warning, so maybe I'm not
Chicken Little and the sky really WAS falling. Phew, thank God I didn't
die
while watching this drivel. I'd end up in movie purgatory.
So let me explain why I'm skull-****ing 'The Day After Tomorrow'. The
first
2/3rds are probably not that much worse than anything else Emmerich has
made
with his writing/producing partner Dean Devlin (who's AWOL here, a genius
move). Stuff is breaking, people are dying, melodramatic near-death
moments
happen to the leading characters, and we're headed for a showdown between
the survivors and that vindictive ***** Mother Nature. Eye-rolls were kept
to a relative minimum for about an hour. But then came the wolves. In a
chase scene apropos of nothing, Gyllenhaal and 2 suckers have to dodge
some
digital wolves, who escaped from a zoo and ride the subway to NYC. When
you
already have a global disaster movie on your hands, do you really need to
add fake drama? I mean, WOLVES? And how did a couple of limping teenagers
outrun a cold breeze in the big climax? You even see the insta-freeze
chasing them! I laughed. I laughed long and I laughed hard.
It bugs me to no end that movies like this undercut the environmental
movement. The picture tries to stand for something, but it makes its case
so
badly that not even those of us who enjoy breathing moderately clean air
can
take it seriously. If I had been sitting beside Dubya while watching this,
I'd feel pretty sheepish. He'd be scarfing a pretzel and grinning about
how
preposterous the anti-oil liberal message really is. After I explained to
him what "preposterous" and "is" mean, what else could I do but agree that
we recyclers must be full of baloney (or full of some sort of meatlike
****k
product). If 'The Day After Tomorrow' is right, then I MUST be wrong. The
"let's save the planet or it'll kill us...like, tomorrow" message is a
sledgehammer for those who need to be sledged...and it's a kick in the
balls
for those of us who want to play ball. For the record: if such
catastrophic
events ever did happen, I think Mexico would tell Americans to **** off.
Or
they'd at least say, "you gringos ain't comin' HERE! You don't want our
wetbacks, so we don't want yours!"
Since Roland Emmerich loves to wave the American flag so much, I thought
I'd
resort to suck-up patriotism too. Here now is 'The Day After Tomorrow'
version of the American National Anthem, the ol' "Star Spangled Banner".
Sing with me:
Oh say can you see, through a hack's empty mind.
What so proudly he sold as a weather flick about the cold.
With huge budget and F/X, and the plot gears that grind.
On the big screens we watched, bought tickets like we were told.
And Emmerich's pointless flare, tornadoes whipping up the air,
Gave proof to the smart that our brains were not there.
Oh say do such stupid films like these still work...
On the crowds of naive who cheer this **** like jerks?
To add to the lambasting, write to flickershows@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
And check out
my website at http://groups.msn.com/TheMovieFiend.
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