THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW (2004) *** This is not a scientific movie about global warming, any more than the ‘50s creature features were scientific films about nuclear power. It follows that it should not be criticized for any perceived deficiencies as such. What Roger Corman and those guys did in the ‘50s, and what Roland Emmerich does her, is work off of a fear in the collective subconscious. We all know that global warming is a problem, whether we admit it or not. We all know that it's probably a bigger problem than we admit. We all know that we don't understand it, don't have a grip on it, so there's a belief in there somewhere that it could be terrible and of Biblical proportions, just waiting for someone to fan the flame. That's what they do here. No one is ever going to put this script in front of their script writing class to marvel at, and there's no one worthy of Oscar consideration even if the Academy wasn't so lame, but none of that turns out to be a problem. Some lines are so melodramatic that probably no one could utter them with confidence, and others are unnecessarily botched, but Emmerich roles right on through all that like a freight train because it isn't the point. The point is to entertain, and to create historic levels of intensity and suspense, and I don't think you can say that he's anything but an incredible success by the standard. Yeah, they goof around for awhile, setting up more plot lines than they can possibly handle (it turns out that they can-it reminds me of Deep Impact in that sense), but after that I can't think of a film more consistently suspenseful and intense, right up to the hokey conclusions. And it's not that they're just throwing things in there to scare you, it's that you knew that they were there, know that they or something else must be there, somewhere, somewhere that we're going there must be something like that. There's not a lot of humor to it, but what there is, is fall-down flat funny, but without breaking the cold hold that the film has set upon you. I like the idea of glorifying the smart, hard-working kids, and I'm happy to see Randy Quaid wandering around in the middle of something this good. The weird thing is, I think people will be more concerned about global warming after watching the film. Not because of marine layers and gulf flows and science, but because we all know that there are really scary things in our head. And now they're connected to something out there with a name .
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