'Day After Tomorrow' is 'mother of all disaster movies'

By Jack Garner
Gannett News Service

THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW (PG-13) Three Stars (Good) As star Dennis Quaid calls it, this is "the mother of all disaster movies," with enough global mayhem to thrill destruction junkies for years to come. Global warming triggers a series of storms that bring the new ice age — in 24 hours! It's hokey but fun, though certainly not the weighty apocalyptic warning film some environmentalists have been arguing about. Roland Emmerich directs, in standard popcorn fashion. 20th Century Fox, 124 minutes.

Multiple tornadoes erase the Hollywood sign and destroy Los Angeles. The mother of all tidal waves drowns Manhattan, sending a Russian freighter up Fifth Avenue until it "docks" at the New York Public Library. Hail the size of grapefruit rain down on Tokyo. But wait, the day is only half over. Giant frosted hurricanes cover the entire Northern Hemisphere, bringing blizzards of snow and lowering temperatures so drastically and quickly that momentary exposure is instantly fatal. One moment you're breathing. The next you're a shattered icicle. One day is normal, the next is a new ice age.

The only creatures that seem to be enjoying themselves are the arctic wolves that escape the Bronx Zoo and wander the snow-covered streets of New York, looking for the stray surviving human for dinner.

Modern-day digital effects have made wholesale mayhem a mainstay of Hollywood movies. No filmmaker can match Roland Emmerich for gleeful destruction. In "Independence Day," aliens blow up the White House. In "Godzilla," the monster mashes Manhattan. If 1970s disaster-meister Irwin Allen could come back from the dead, I'm sure the creator of "The Poseidon Adventure," "The Towering Inferno" and "The Swarm" would love to play with Emmerich's digital toys.

But, with "The Day After Tomorrow," Emmerich has created a pre-emptive strike, leaving nothing behind for any future disaster director. In the words of its star, Dennis Quaid, Emmerich has made "the mother of all disaster movies."

The premise is global warming, and its expected horrific results. Accordingly, "The Day After Tomorrow" has become a political football, with weather-disaster believers and nonbelievers from the left and right arguing over the film's dire predictions even before it hits the screen. (Just now, while writing this, I'm receiving an e-mail from MoveOn.org, urging viewers to give serious thought to "the movie the White House doesn't want you to see.")

It's unclear whether "The Day After Tomorrow" can stand up under the weight of such politicized scrutiny. The film has far more in common with standard Hollywood disaster fare than with any serious attempt at public discourse. It's traditional, high-intensity entertainment, clearly more interested in selling popcorn than in pushing an ecological agenda.

For openers, Emmerich uses considerable dramatic license to condense into 24 hours an ice age time frame that would probably take generations. Coincidences and improbabilities pile up like the snow in Central Park. Secondly, "The Day After Tomorrow" overflows with the hokey dialogue, standard characters and operatic set pieces that are, for better or worse, what disaster flicks are all about.

Jake Gyllenhaal, Sela Ward, Jay O. Sanders and Kenneth Welsh co-star with Quaid, though actors in such flicks always play second fiddle to a crashing wave or an out-of-control freighter or assaults on the iconic structures of America. Lady Liberty gets enough screen time to earn a Screen Actors Guild card. The Statue of Liberty hasn't taken this much abuse since filmmakers buried her in the sand for "Planet of the Apes."

Rated PG-13 for intense situations of peril.