Feature
THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW
Starring Dennis Quaid, Jake Gyllenhaal and Ian Holm
Directed by Roland Emmerich
Tornadoes whirl through Los Angeles. A scorching heat wave kills thousands in Europe. Giant hailstones fall in Tokyo. A blizzard lashes New Delhi. And in Calgary, people are just beginning to feel like temperatures are finally tolerable year-round….
Jokes aside, this is clearly a meteorological calamity of a magnitude the world hasn’t witnessed anytime in recorded history. And people will soon be turning out to watch it in droves when the new action blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow opens this week at theatres around North America.
The film is the latest in a long line of apocalyptic disaster movies that revel in the large-scale destruction of civilization as we know it. At least since Nostradamus, society has had its doomsday prophets, and perhaps disaster films simply offer a highly cathartic way of satisfying our desire to ponder, through cinema, the extinction of the entire human race. Certainly, during the late 1990s, as Y2K paranoia reached its zenith, Hollywood studios released a plethora of big-budget disaster films, including Twister (1996), Dante’s Peak (1997) and Deep Impact (1998), among others.
Despite their obvious dramatic shortcomings, many of these films were of interest in that they displayed a naturalistic approach to art. Naturalism – the idea that humanity is part of nature’s order and does not exist separately from or in dominion over it – has existed in literature since the 19th century, but its emergence in disaster films is a relatively recent phenomenon. From the storm-chasers in Twister, who put their own lives in danger (again and again) as they try to gather data that will allow meteorologists to better predict tornado activity, to the astronauts in Deep Impact, who attempt to destroy a meteor hurtling through space towards Earth, the characters in these films all find themselves at the mercy of an indifferent universe.
Solely on the basis of its trailers, The Day After Tomorrow appears to be similar in its naturalistic approach to the disaster film, but boldly different in that its doomsday scenario is hitched to an accelerated version of the global climate change that the Earth is at present experiencing. Whether the film’s execution is as brilliant as its concept remains to be seen. Although it is clearly a science-fiction effects blockbuster, it may at the very least have the opportunity to inform certain sectors of mainstream America about some of the potentially devastating effects of climate change.
At least one American environmentalist is monitoring the release of The Day After Tomorrow with great interest, in the hopes that the film will get her compatriots thinking about the issues in a critical way.
Kim Carlson, an environmental activist and entrepreneur in Minneapolis, Minnesota, says, "I think there is a polarization going on in our country with people who believe that man is adding to global warming, and should be doing something about it, and then the other side… saying that ‘Oh, no, no. It’s all very natural. We’ve had these cycles before, we’re having it again, and we’re not doing anything to add to it.’"
Of course, it’s also possible that The Day After Tomorrow will merely prolong this debate, playing on cultural anxieties about the chaotic unpredictability of meteorological or astronomical events, not to mention anxieties about impending apocalypse. But given that the film is being released at a time when U.S. President George Bush still refuses to sign the Kyoto Protocol, which aims to regulate carbon dioxide emissions worldwide, it may become an interesting political manoeuvre in what is an election year in the United States.
Quoted in the film’s press kit, director Roland Emmerich (Independence Day) says, "If the world goes down, you’re forced to take a look at your life. And audiences know that when they watch a disaster movie they have to think about their life and they have to make decisions – like what they really want and who they really love." But even if Emmerich’s affinity for disaster movies lies primarily in their human element, this film surely has the potential to be a cautionary tale, to make its audience consider their own role in climate change and to ask what they might be able to do to minimize their ecological footprint.
"Well, I think of course that the theory of evolution – how we are as part of nature – is that we will try to survive," says environmentalist Carlson. "I think that happens without thinking. The piece that has been missing for so long is this idea… that we are not really part of nature. The environment, in our country, is a piece out here. ‘We’re not part of the environment. We’re human beings. We’re masters of our universe.’ It’s just ridiculous. It’s a crazy egocentric thought. That’s how America has been forever, but I think the hope is that green is becoming mainstream."
Presumably, The Day After Tomorrow posits that humans have helped turn the ecology against themselves. So at the very least, it might help to rephrase the debate so that Americans begin to understand that we don’t just need to preserve the environment for altruistic reasons, but because the survival of the species depends upon it. Of course, it may also be completely naive to pin one’s hopes for social change on a mammoth computer generated spectacle in which most people will just go to see Manhattan levelled by a tidal wave. But in the end, what greater medium is there to carry forth the message that people must begin to preserve our earthly habitat instead of destroying it? |
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