- Call it the Giant Switch Theory: At some point, global
warming will send enough polar ice slush into the ocean to turn off the
flow of warm air and water. In a flash, weather around the Earth will turn
monstrous -- killer tornadoes in Los Angeles, super tsunamis in Manhattan
and football-sized ice chunks dropping from the sky in Tokyo.
-
- Though scientists might not buy this theory -- especially
the in-a-flash part -- Hollywood sure has. Fox's $125 million The Day After
Tomorrow is built on the idea that global warming could explode into global
disaster at any moment.
-
- Such a scenario is scary to imagine -- scarier, certainly,
than those of other disaster movies. Earthquakes and twisters are too localized,
aliens and giant spiders too ludicrous. But global warming is something
the scientific community speaks with near-unanimity about. Cataclysmic
change, many will tell you, is on the way, be it next year or in a millennium
or two.
-
- That's not to accuse The Day After Tomorrow of being
a responsible environmental text. It's a Hollywood blockbuster -- brash,
dazzling and, beneath its "science," quite silly.
-
- The film opens with a scan of bad weather around the
world -- mega-hail in Japan, blizzards in New Delhi and ceaseless rain
in New York. The unprecedented storms are of special concern to Jack Hall
(played by Dennis Quaid), a paleoclimatologist whose research suggests
that the weather is about to get far worse.
-
- In Jack's remarkably accurate model, continentwide storms
with temperatures cold enough to freeze gasoline will sweep south, killing
everything in their path. Jack warns the president of the impending doom,
and then heads north from Washington, D.C., to Manhattan.
-
- He's in search of his son Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal), who,
with some other survivors, has holed up in the New York Public Library,
burning books to stay warm. By the time Jack arrives, Manhattan has been
frozen solid, and there's not a living soul to be seen.
-
- His search should be dramatic. Instead, it feels like
an afterthought, coming after the film's most effective segments, the weather
scenes.
-
- Director Roland Emmerich, who vaporized the White House
in Independence Day and stomped on Manhattan in Godzilla, outdoes himself
here. The punishment The Day After Tomorrow unleashes on New York and Los
Angeles is phenomenal -- raging torrents blasting through the streets,
enormous tornadoes pulling buildings apart, city blocks flash-frozen. It's
completely convincing and, in an eerie way, quite beautiful.
-
- Against all of this spectacular carnage, the Jack-Sam
story seems insignificant. Emmerich builds us a global crisis, with hundreds
of millions dead and more displaced, then fritters away his movie on a
father-son reunion.
-
- In that way, The Day After Tomorrow feels like a missed
opportunity -- the sense of dread and disaster is sharp enough to pop at
least a few viewers out of their complacency. Is it possible to watch a
film about the end of civilization without thinking of your own place on
the planet?
-
- But Emmerich, by narrowing his global tragedy into a
one-family redemption story, gives the viewers an escape route. Everything
will be OK, the (relatively) happy ending tells us.
-
- Some environmentalists see The Day After Tomorrow as
an opportunity to broaden the discussion of global climate change. MoveOn.org
is mobilizing its troops to distribute fliers after screenings. Greenpeace
built a look-alike spoof site that lists ExxonMobil as climate change's
director and George W. Bush as producer.
-
- But those hoping The Day After Tomorrow will radicalize
the general public's views on greenhouse emissions are out of luck. Emmerich's
film is the furthest thing from a rabble-rousing, kill-your-SUV manifesto.
The film attaches little blame -- there's no belching smokestacks, no smog-filled
highways (and no flatulent cows, for that matter).
-
- By the film's end, Emmerich has taken his look-on-the-bright-side
theme to its ultimate conclusion, showing us that the super-storms are
a kind of planetary sneeze -- a necessary reaction to a bit of pollution.
Forget human suffering and cataclysmic change, Emmerich tells us. Global
climate shifts are a pretty good thing in the long run.
-
- By dodging the deeper questions of nature, science and
humanity that were within his grasp, Emmerich has created an incredible
special effect: a feel-good movie about the end of our world.
-
- The Day After Tomorrow is rated PG-13 for scenes of destruction.
-
- © Copyright 2004, Lycos, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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