Flak Magazine: Review of The Day After Tomorrow, 06.09.04

The Bush administration doesn't want you to see The Day After Tomorrow, which might be its first pro-environment policy decision. It has instructed NASA not to answer questions about it not because it actually thinks you care about global warming, but because the movie blames it for killing a billion people — that's the sort of subtle, thoughtful consideration that writer/director Roland Emmerich has in mind.

The Day After Tomorrow opens with a shot of an American flag whipping in the wind on the Arctic ice shelf; cut to a rather subtle capitalist phallus image — a giant drill penetrating the ice. A crack splits the shelf, kind of like the opening scene in Ice Age, with Dennis Quaid in the Scrat role. The sun bears down on Quaid as he pulls himself out of the abyss with his trusty ice pick. Next, cut to a "United Nations Summit on Global Warming," which I guess is supposed to be about the Kyoto protocol. These sorts of issues usually don't fall under UN jurisdiction, but even more unusual is that the vice president is representing the United States, which he does by whispering to the Saudi Arabian delegation in their big turbans. Dick Cheney — er, Vice President Becker — harps about "sensationalist climate change scenarios" and wants the world to know that ridiculous environmental controls "hurt the global economy." Right on cue, Professor Jack Hall (Quaid) storms in and announces that a disruption in the North Atlantic current could trigger a "new ice age," and the threat is real because we've "reached a critical desalinization point." This is all very riveting, especially when Professor Hall exhorts the delegates to, for the love of God, please pay attention to "the science."

For a film that's so adamant about paying attention to the science and ridiculing skeptics of sensationalism, this movie really doesn't pay a lot of attention to the science and is rather, um, sensationalist. The first scene after the mysterious UN summit involves a Japanese man in Tokyo talking on his cell phone. We follow him through the streets for a while; it starts raining, and then he's hit in the head by a killer volleyball-sized hailstone. Cut to weather vanes spinning ominously, and then we find a weatherman banging his secretary at the news station. Why? Well, as Steve Martin informed us in L.A. Story, Los Angeles meteorologists have nothing to do because it never rains. In a breathtakingly narcissistic move, Emmerich decides to have a tornado erase the Hollywood sign as if to say, "Listen, you need to start driving hybrid Hondas like good professor Hall, otherwise you won't get to watch crazy summer blockbusters anymore. You don't want that, do you?!"

Fox News — yes, Fox News — is taken completely off-guard by all this commotion. Fox offers no explanation for the wild tornado outbreak, but they do show us the White House, where the President is preparing to take "decisive action." What actually happens is that the president marches into what is supposed to be the situation room still in his jogging suit to ask the veep, "What do you think we should do?" If Emmerich were a real visionary, we would have had the Bush/Cheney stand-ins just read each other's body language, but instead Becker announces that air traffic will be suspended. Cut to New York City, where "lower Manhattan is virtually inaccessible" because of a giant wall of water, and we see men in yellow FDNY jackets rushing to certain death to save stranded citizens. In this, Emmerich reveals his thesis: The Day After Tomorrow is the Greens' Sept. 11, 2001, the day when everything changes and America must pay for its arrogance.

To this end, Emmerich creates some compelling imagery: The walls of water crash through Manhattan like the dust from the Twin Towers' collapse; waves swamp Lady Liberty's torch, suggesting that shirking responsibility will be the downfall of free society. Emmerich's destruction of New York is haunting, if not downright chilling, but after the disaster, there's no place for the movie to go and Emmerich knows it. He even stoops as low as having Professor Hall's wife (Sela Ward) stay behind with a little balding cancer patient.

Having painted himself into a corner, Emmerich plays fast and loose with the audience's tolerance for absurdity. The cops want to evacuate the New York Public Library, but Professor Hall's son Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal, whose love interest is somehow not some hot older woman) says they'll all freeze to death if they go outside — but won't it eventually be the same temperature inside, especially when it's so cold that a Russian tanker ends up frozen in the flood waters? Or when the whole city is flooded and cell phone service has stopped, the pay phone still works because "it gets its power directly from the power grid?" And in the most audacious attempt to make up for neglectful parenting in the history of film, Jack decides to walk from Philadelphia to New York to save his son, even though it's been assumed that everyone in the entire Northeast is dead. This bold decision is made thusly:

Best Friend: Lucy, tell him this isn't the same.
Jack: I have to do this.
Lucy: I know.

The rescue takes three days, all the more amazing because it's so cold that the fuel lines in the rescue party's hybrid SUVs freeze, but their tent keeps them warm enough to get a good night's rest.

The ineptitude of The Day After Tomorrow's "human story" is to be expected from a summer blockbuster. What makes this particular movie noteworthy is how much it labors as crazy liberal Hollywood propaganda. No less a symbol of liberal compassion than baby seals fall victim to the new ice age — the seals somehow end up on the steps of the New York Public Library, which itself becomes a safe haven for our stranded heroes. (One almost expects life-saving radio communication from National Public Radio.) Here, Emmerich plays the irony card: They have to burn books to stay alive, except that the head librarian refuses to burn an original Gutenberg Bible that just happens to be lying around. Why? Because it "represents the Age of Reason that I refuse to believe is over." Emmerich probably thinks this is some big damning statement about those who refuse to heed warnings of our imminent demise, but at this point, there's been so much absurdity that the audience can't take any of this seriously. Really, how can we listen to this "Age of Reason" nonsense with a straight face when Jake and the crew just outran a flash freeze? When the president orders the evacuation of the nation and the Mexican government responds by closing its borders, forcing millions of Americans to cross the Rio Grande, it's funny but not biting, because of the rest of the movie is so hyperbolic.

And so Emmerich's movie becomes a unwitting symbol of why liberals aren't taken seriously on these sorts of issues: They preach about reason and science and dispassionate inquiry and whatnot, but then break out the baby seals and start hyperbolizing, employing the same scare tactics they cry about the other side using. The Greens and liberals are losing the environmental debate because they've never really clearly communicated how government policy affects our quality of life. Rather, they make martyrs of spotted owls, call the Bush administration pro-arsenic-in-the-water and propose scenarios like The Day After Tomorrow. This movie doesn't take the time to connect all of these things, propose any solutions, or say what the Bush administration has done that's so much worse than, say, Clinton's. There's plenty of material and plenty of opportunity to make a thought-provoking movie about our environmental future, but Emmerich goes the conventional route and shocks us with special effects and tugs our hearts with a simple parenting narrative. It begs for us to cheer when the president dies and faux-Cheney is reduced to thanking the Mexicans for their hospitality on the Weather Channel. Rather than try for conversion, The Day After Tomorrow just assumes we're already on board and tries to scare us into action.

— Stephen Himes (stephenhimes@hotmail.com)