Review
THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW
Starring Dennis Quaid, Jake Gyllenhall and Ian Holm
Co-written and directed by Roland Emmerich
Now playing
Check listings
You just can’t keep a utopian science fiction hero down, no matter how many twisters, tsunamis, ice hurricanes and other extinction-level events old Mother Nature might direct his way.
Yet, the new blockbuster disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow has such honourable political intentions that one is almost forced to forgive the fact that its human dramas are mawkish celebrations of plucky American bravado and traditional family values. From the outset, the film’s protagonist, professor Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid), is portrayed as a maverick climatologist who’s boldly critical of American government policy on global climate change. But even an environmentalist wonk like Hall can’t predict the abrupt atmospheric and oceanic shifts that will soon pitch the entire northern hemisphere into a calamitous ice age and, of course, force him to reconsider the choices that have estranged him from his wife, Lucy (Sela Ward), and teenage son, Sam (Jake Gyllenhall).
Where big-budget action effects spectacles are concerned, The Day After Tomorrow is more well conceived than most in that it at least attempts to advance a relevant social agenda. Certainly, the film is based in scientific fantasy – even the most alarmist climate change scenarios suggest that catastrophes like the ones depicted so artfully in this film would probably take decades, if not centuries, to come about. But simply by confronting its audience with the idea that ecological issues should be of concern to everyone, even Americans, the film moves beyond science fiction and ever so slightly into the realm of polemics.
Granted, filmmaker Roland Emmerich is better at depicting scenes of meteorological devastation than he is at conveying the finer points of American environmental policy (never mind the finer points of character). Many of the digital images in this overblown cautionary tale remind us of humanity’s relatively insignificant place in the universe. But beyond their evocation of the majestic and destructive force of natural phenomena, these images also intend to show us why every nation, and particularly the United States, needs to stop telling its citizens that "the economy is as important as the environment" – as the vice president, played by Kenneth Welsh, says emphatically to our hero, Jack.
The social commentary doesn’t stop there, but is employed ironically for comic relief throughout the film. When certain characters burn books in order to stay warm as the next ice age sets in around them, a couple of them debate the relative worth of Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy. Meanwhile, there’s a bit about American refugees fleeing to Mexico that met with gleeful guffaws at the screening I attended. As did the fantastical idea that the U.S., in order to ensure safe haven for its citizens, would broker a deal to eliminate the debts of various Latin American nations.
The various political subtexts in The Day After Tomorrow help to place it among the best disaster films ever made, but it’s still far from perfect. Naïvely idealistic in its depiction of apocalypse, the film declines to show any scenes of the sort of self-interested chaos one would expect when faced with the imminent demise of the entire human race. Only in Hollywood is the collapse of society accompanied by solidarity and goodwill among people of various classes, races, creeds and colours. Perhaps I take a dim view of human nature, but I prefer my sci-fi on the dystopian end of the scale – a little less co-operation among the survivors might have added to the tension and conveyed their peril more palpably.
Moreover, the film never allows the natural calamity to resonate on a personal level – indeed there are characters whose sole function is to succumb to the most massive weather event in recorded history. But our hero’s fate is never in question, not even when he straps on snowshoes for what has to be the most poorly motivated cross-country journey in movie history. What sort of idiot risks certain death just to make a schmaltzy point to his family? And what sort of cautionary tale is it where the characters actually get to learn from their mistakes? Isn’t it the audience that’s supposed to be learning something here?
If Emmerich really wanted this lesson to resonate deeply in the collective American psyche, he might have created a less utopian vision of the demolition of the American empire. |
Copyright ©2004 FFWD. All rights reserved.