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    The Day After Tomorrow

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    adamwatchesmovies@ wrote:

    6

    “The Day After Tomorrow” can be entertaining and enjoyable, but only when it displays its scenes of destruction and special effects. While on an expedition in Antarctica, paleoclimatologist Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid) discovers that it’s only a matter of days before a new ice age begins, but U. S. Vice President Raymond Becker (Kenneth Welsh) basically laughs at his “theories” and ignores his warnings. Meanwhile, Jack’s son, Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal) is over in New York for a school science competition with some friends and his crush, Laura (Emmy Rossum) Then, the amount of fresh water being dumped into our oceans finally takes its toll. Tornadoes wreck Hollywood, -150-degree superstorms freeze people instantly, tsunamis, hailstorms and tidal waves wreak havoc on our human civilization. Will Sam and his friends be able to make it? What about his father, who decides to trek all the way up to New York to rescue him? Will the little boy with cancer survive? Will ANYONE survive?! There’s way too much going on in this movie. Like most of Rolland Emmerich’s films, we’ve got a central story and loads of other, secondary stories on the side and those characters are largely unnecessary. The cancer patient Sam’s mom is taking care of brings nothing to the story except for an attempt to pull at your heartstrings. The same applies to a homeless man and his faithful dog who struggle to survive this cataclysm. I’d also eliminate the librarians with whom Sam takes refuge and the scientists in Scotland, whose sole purpose is to confirm that climate change is coming... fast! This streamlining would’ve helped the film greatly. The plot is constantly jumping from one group to another, meaning the principal characters don’t get very well developed. At the end of the film, we don’t know anything about Sam’s crush Laura except that she’s interested in him. Characters often act illogically. When Sam and his friends are inside an abandoned Russian ship and need to get inside a locked door, they don’t use the ax that’s handy to break in. Instead, Sam goes outside in the freezing cold, shimmies over to a window looking into the room and breaks into the window that way. There are many scenes where people take off their gloves outside (and if you’ve been outside in that kind of temperature, you know better than to touch a metal surface with a naked hand) and I scratched my head at the people in the library, who burned books in the fireplace instead of the wooden chairs. I’m pretty sure wood burns longer than paper and with the librarians nearby lamenting the loss of their precious tomes, you would think these geniuses would have thrown those in first. A lot of these plot points sound good on paper when you can imagine that there’s nothing else in the room but when you don’t inform your set decorator of what actions take place in the scene, you end up with big mistakes. You can tell this film was quickly written with a focus on the special effects instead of the plot. In one scene it’s so cold that gasoline freezes and anyone caught in the storm are dead. In the next, everyone is just fine as long as they’re in an enclosed space. It doesn’t matter if it’s a tent, a metal helicopter or a room; if the doors are closed, you’ll be ok. At one point, Sam and his friends have to escape from a pack of wolves, freshly escaped from the zoo. How did those wolves manage to survive outside in the cold when everyone else froze to death? This film didn’t need an action-y sequence or some villains to spice up the movie; Mother Earth is already gunning for our heroes! I wish “The Day After Tomorrow” had tried harder. When cities are getting torn up by twisters and flooded by giant tidal waves, it’s awesome. That’s what you want when you pop in one of these disaster movies. Not some lame plots about sick kids making it out alive or grouchy politicians being forced to eat their words; you want charismatic people that feel genuine fighting mother nature. I’m not asking for heavy dramatic and incredibly nuanced performances, but everyone working on this film knew they were going to nail those scenes of destruction. Couldn’t they spend a bit more time and money fleshing out the story? When the destruction is on display you won’t care too much about how ridiculous it gets (ok, maybe you will when the people in the library have to literally run away from the cold) At this time, “The Day After Tomorrow” is pretty unlikely to return to theaters so if you’re watching it, it’ll be at home. That means you can talk to your friends when it gets slow or go up and make yourself a snack whenever the useless secondary characters are on. When it gets to the special effects, sit down and marvel at it all. Maybe it’s just that it’s a bad movie that gets a lot of things right or it’s just so mediocre, while still having some cool moments that it’s not worthy of hatred. I didn’t have a bad time watching it, nor did I have a great time and if somebody asked me if they should rent it, I’d say: go ahead, it’s not great but you won’t be sorry to have seen it. (Fullscreen version on DVD, December 6, 2013)


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