Dir.
Roland Emmerich, 2004, USA, 124 mins/English
Cast:
Dennis Quaid, Jake Gyllenhall, Emmy Rossum, Sela Ward, Jay O. Sanders, Ian Holm
At least it looked nice. The film had a pleasant, simplistic pictorial quality that diverted from its utter predictability, its attempt to suspend disbelief from extraordinary events. The plot is that the northern hemisphere is buried under a new ice age in a couple of weeks by a new entrant to the disaster movie genre: the climate change disaster movie. The climate may have changed but the genre has not, and any sense of change is rather muted by the fact that the lead cast inevitably survive, bar the token affecting death, and the millions of dead remain unseen apart from a few token frozen corpse shots.
The combination of the director of Independence Day and the topic of climate change don't leave much to a cynic's imagination, and so it proves in the cinema. The question of a changed US is also rather complicated by the speed with which the planet plunges into a new ice age - a startling rate of climate change even by Hollywood's standards, and not something that the odd line about the speed of death of mammoths in the previous ice age can cover. Director Roland Emmerich has stated in an interview with National Geographic that "it is a movie that should not just entertain but also make people think". He adds that in his cinema "everything is more extreme". There lies the problem: the film is most likely to make people think how safe our planet's climate is, if all the catastrophe Hollywood can muster is as ludicrous as this.
But The Day After Tomorrow isn't really about climate change; it's about America and its myths, a modern-day comic book of the American dream and another product from a line that started with the western. The tropes of disaster movies are all present and correct, including dialogue such as, "I have to do this", "I know", "save as many as you can", "I will come for you", "nothing like this has ever happened before.at least not in the last ten thousand years". The action includes going back for things, someone disappearing under water for an unfeasible amount of time and then emerging perfectly safe, wolves going missing from the zoo and turning up for some CGI-mauling of the heroes, a character declaiming against the tide of people swimming past him, and bleeping computers in monitoring stations. The shots encompass occasional ramping into slow motion at kisses, restless tracking in interiors, ER - style steadicam shots as characters march through busy corridors, the use of an eyeline travelling round into shock to convey approaching danger, the trophy CGI shot - a lingering pull-out to a huge wide of impressive though too-immaculate destruction. What a shame that when cinema has such epic visuals within easy reach they must suffer the devaluation of them being computer-generated. The characters conform to the types too: brilliant under-funded scientists who were right all along (Jack Hall, a stock performance by Quaid with a supporting-Brit role for Ian Holm, who of course dies fairly early on), his motherly and still caring ex-wife (Dr. Lucy Hall, a forgettable Sela Ward), the brilliant but lightly troubled younger lead male (Sam Hall, Gyllenhall's offbeat charm rather wasted), and the potential-mother girl he will win (the most beautiful geek in the world, Emmy Rossum).
The Hollywood disaster movie is the American dream retold: different things happen, but it is the same story of the individualism of an everyman against enemies (be they Indians, aliens, collapsing tower blocks, twisters, dinosaurs, asteroids or climate change); of the triumph of the attractive, white, heterosexual couple of the next generation within the aura of the family; of the defence of the homeland. As the myth of the West has been exhausted, the threatened homeland has migrated east: The Day After Tomorrow makes New York 's Public Library the centre of hope in a beleaguered country, the new ground zero. The twin towers are conspicuous in their absence in the disaster photography of a flooded/frozen Manhattan. The tidal wave approaches a changed city - skyscrapers are very handy in these situations - but the film can make no direct acknowledgement of the change. To do so would be to break the genre dream and recognise that currently the most affecting disaster movie plot would be co-ordinated terrorist attacks on the US. Post-USSR, no safe threats remain: what shadow goons and evil forces will Hollywood rustle up in the future in place of the unmentionable reality?
The ridiculousness mounts nicely towards the finale, with the new President making his first broadcast from Mexico. The US refugee presence in Mexico is made possible by cancelling Latin American debt and the broadcast records that "in our time of need they ("what we used to call the third world") have taken us in and sheltered us."
Such warm developments amidst the ice and death oppose what this film stands for: its ludicrousness and sensationalism reinforce the US 's isolated complacency: even with the entire nation (and, in a passing mention, the rest of northern Earth) under water or ice, it ends with blithe contentment. The ice storm that rips through Tokyo early in the film stands as Hollywood's view of the wider world: narratively, nothing happens. It takes an identical storm on the Californian coast to move the plot along. So the US indifference to Kyoto is ironically enshrined by a $100+ million of somewhat enjoyable drivel which claims to warn of the dangers facing us.
Richard Dilks
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