The Day After Tomorrow



You don't see Steve Guttenberg in the theaters very much anymore. When I heard they were making a sequel to his 1983 TV movie The Day After I hoped and prayed Steve would grace the silver screen.

In The Day After Tomorrow Dennis Quaid plays a "paleo-climatologist" who has found evidence that humans are causing global warming that may lead to a new ice age in hundreds of years. What he doesn't know is that he's wrong. The new ice age starts... Let's see, today is Saturday, tomorrow is Sunday, so Monday. The new ice age starts Monday.


"YOU MANIACS. YOU BLEW IT UP. DAMN YOU. GOD DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL. "

The ice age is heralded by CGI disasters, which are the raison d'etre of The Day After Tomorrow. Hail falls on Japan, huge tornados destroy Los Angeles, and New York City is flooded. (Nothing happens anyplace inland in the U.S. presumably because it was nuked in The Day After.) These "Weather Gone Wild" sequences are spectacular. And they all come in the first third of the movie.

What's left? Blow up some nuclear bombs and get the earth's magnetic field operating again, or build giant spaceships to take us to another planet? No, time for more than an hour of Dennis Quaid walking on snow. His son (James Glyenhaal, the other Elijah Wood) was trapped in New York, so Quaid dons arctic gear and walks from Philadelphia to rescue him. The last half of The Day After Tomorrow is so mind-numbingly boring it actually had me pining for Van Helsing, which was dumb but at least had things happening.


The real key to surviving a natural disaster is to stay away from landmarks.

The main threat for Quaid's son is freezing to death. Trapped in the New York City Public Library the son, his friends, a homeless guy, and a couple of the librarians have to burn books to survive. The head librarian refuses to let them burn a "Guttenberg bible," which is presumably all of the scripts Steve has ever acted. The librarian says he wants to make sure that if nothing else of human civilization survives, the bible does. He must be a huge fan of Bad Medicine (1985).

At the end of the film the movie becomes desperate for drama, so really silly things happen. My favorite is the "super-cell" eye of the storm, which "sucks air down from the troposphere" and freezes people solid where they stand. This results is our heroes running from the super-cold air much as people in movies run from fireballs. Fun fact: super cold air can be stopped by ill-fitting doors, so long as the film's heroes are on the other side. There's also a ridiculous moment at the end where Quaid arrives at the site of the public library and there's nothing but a snowy field. Oh no, his son is dead. Then he moves ten feet to his left, and oops! the library is right there after all. If these people are burning books to survive, shouldn't there be smoke you could see from far away?


"Destroying the One Ring is going to be harder than I thought!"

In the end I learned that to survive the apocalypse you have to be attractive or sassy. I'm not taking any chances. I'm going in for plastic surgery and lessons in etiquette from Mo'Nique.

Posted: Sat - May 29, 2004 at      

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