Roland Emmerich’s latest summer blockbuster is an exceptionally stupid movie. Of course the consensus is that summer blockbusters, even ones that come out in the spring, are supposed to be stupid. But occasionally a summer blockbuster is also expected to offer some food for thought. The Day After Tomorrow, the latest big-budget SF disaster flick, broaches—or stumbles over—the issue of global warming, or what I prefer to call Bush weather, a topic that’s surely worthy of some reflection.
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Al Gore declared that this movie was at least an honest fiction about global warming—unlike the fictions about the subject emanating from the White House. Using a stupid movie to call attention to a serious problem put him in a less-than-dignified position, but if he hadn’t tied his arguments to a stupid movie the news media might well have ignored him.
Global warming may be real, but the string of disasters we see in this movie—earthquakes, tornadoes, melting ice caps, hailstones the size of grapefruits falling on Tokyo and knocking cell phones out of people’s hands, a tidal wave engulfing Manhattan and then freezing—are made to seem less real than movie-worthy, meaning both fun and unreal. Apparently one great danger of global warming is that it might allow some wolves in a New York City zoo to escape and chase teenagers through a Russian ship that’s stranded somewhere around Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street.
Directed by Roland Emmerich
Written by Emmerich and Jeffrey Nachmanoff
With Dennis Quaid, Jake Gyllenhaal, Emmy Rossum, Ian Holm, Sela Ward
