If I learned anything at all about the weather from having watched The Day After Tomorrow it is this: Everything is the Vice President's fault. As near as I can tell the whole Global Warming crisis, which only seems to feel like a crisis in August for some reason, can be tracked back to the hateful and pig-headed actions of the Vice President of the United States. That bastard! While I find it hard to believe that the entire world could be cast into the seventh level of hell because of one crotchety old movie stereotype, I'll have to admit that it is good to know who is responsible for this mess. Now that we know who did it all let us discuss what he did and the consequences of his heinous actions.
The concept of The Day After Tomorrow is a familiar one...we are all doomed. The planet has been altered by our greenhouse gas emissions or "Civilization Farts" in such a way that the North Atlantic current has destabilized due to the saline content of the oceans having been reduced by the melting of the polar ice caps as a result of global warming caused by the aforementioned farts. It seems that while humanity has enjoyed the societal advances of technology over the last hundred years or so we have been, unbeknownst to the common folks, cutting the global cheese. Now the world is all smellified and is ready to take revenge on all of us wee little bald apes with our microwave ovens and Cadillacs and Styx 8-tracks. Mr. Roboto rules!
Basically the science in this movie only sounds like science. Rationality is thrown under the bus to make room for an expedient story and some cool special effects. With that in mind one must ignore everything said by Dennis Quaid's character having to do with climate change. You'd wear out your clicking finger trying to navigate through all the Wikipedia articles that deal with climate change while trying to vet anything that he says. We need disasters now, damn it! Science can sit this one out.
In place of a reasonable explanation for things we are given an arrogant villain onto whom we can focus our ire. He's a slave to those "Corporations" and uses words like "people" and "economy" so we know for certain that he's evil through and through. When confronted with the possibility that a century of industrial progress has crippled the Earth's natural heating processes he scoffs and suggests that we can't just undo all of humanity for the sake of avoiding an ice age that may or may not happen. The smug bastard even refuses to take these facts to his boss. Yes sir, the Vice President is not only to blame for what is to come, but clearly he is the only person in the government with any sway at all and if he refuses to take your findings to the President personally, then you'll just have to take your ball of research and go home...to your lab...of sulking.
Okay, so we've got our psuedo-scientific goobledygook, we've got our villain (oh how my rage burns against him and his button-down world!) now we just need a plausible story full of effects that are special. Well, we don't get one. Instead we get to watch this scientist, who is convinced that the world is coming to an end, send his son off to New York because he's on the debate team and as we all know the debate team finals trump any global emergency. I'm pretty sure that World War II was delayed for just such a reason.
The son, played by Jake Gyllenhall, looks in no way like a man in his late twenties playing a teenager. Not at all. And that's a good thing because he needs to play an idealistic and naive kid who must weather the storm to come and serve as that sole voice of reason in this crazy mixed-up world with its hills of beans that sometimes amount to things and other times do not. It is his plight, being stuck in New York when the special effects finally happen, that spurs the story on. By the time the world does start coming to an end the movie could use some spurs. I don't know about you, but when I pay to see intercontinental destruction I don't like being made to wait while people explore their feelings.
Anyway, the mid-atlantic water thingy is desalinated and so on which causes massive cooling in the form of super-gigantic ice hurricanes that form over land. Seriously. The result is a tidal wave, for some reason, that floods the eastern seaboard and then a massive cold snap that instantly freezes everything into a sheet of ice. Anyone caught outside will be killed. Jake Gyllenhall knows all this because he called his dad on an underwater telephone and got the 411 on global disaster. Strangely, none of the refugees huddled together in the library believe him. They all set out for warmer climes and maybe a latte from one of the many Starbucks in NYC. Oh, and they all die from the giant ice hurricane that they all literally watched happen before their eyes and yet didn't seem to think was dangerous.
On the note of giant ice hurricanes...the special effects are great in this movie. When NYC freezes over in a matter of seconds it looks real. The tidal wave, the super storms, the running an screaming; all good. But there seems to be a disconnect between the filmmakers and any type of logic. I know that science is out the window with this film, but there are some things you just can't do and all the CGI in the world is not going to help you. The best example of this is when Jake Gyllenhall and friends outrun cold. The temperature is dropping all over the northern hemisphere, but Jake is just too fast for it. Oh, it chases him down a hallway, but he escapes. Also he cures Septicemia with a single injection of Russian penicillin found on board a derelict oil tanker that somehow sailed down the streets of a major American city. And he outsmarts a pack of wolves. Later on he is saved from certain doom by his dad who walked from Washington D.C. to New York during the onset of a new Ice Age. That actually happens.
I own a copy of this movie on Blu-Ray. It looks awesome and overall I enjoy it, but this movie is way dumb. If you are willing to suspend reason and disbelief in the extreme, you too will enjoy this stupid movie. Otherwise you might bleed from your eyes as your brain tries to make sense of it all.
