24 Lies A Second
Created | Updated Jun 9, 2004
Blame It On The Weatherman
In any kind of extended artistic career, there is bound to come a moment when one runs the risk
of repeating oneself. This is not to say that there isn't merit in choosing to explore the same
themes in slightly different ways: but when you're the director of blockbuster science fiction
films, this sort of behaviour is a bit more noticeable.
And so it proves the case with Roland Emmerich, whose personal antipathy towards New York
seems to border on a psychotic vendetta. So much so, in fact, that he seems to be running out of
ways of devastating the city. Having demolished it with an alien death ray in Independence
Day, and inflicted a giant irradiated iguana on the population in Godzilla, he's now
reduced to basically just clobbering the city that never sleeps with really rotten weather.
Such is the core of Emmerich's latest offering, The Day After Tomorrow, a slightly
oddball event movie which mixes terribly earnest ecological didacticism with good old-fashioned
Hollywood carnage and destruction. The importance of the former can be deduced from the fact
that this is the only summer blockbuster - in fact the only film - I can think of where the plot is
powered by desalinisation. Basically, western civilisation has caused global warming to the extent
where great big chunks of Antarctica are falling off into the sea (says the film), and this vast
influx of fresh water makes the Gulf Stream and other warm-water currents pack up. This in turn
(told you it was didactic) deprives us here in the northern hemisphere of our lovely mild climate -
and being an Emmerich movie, this is demonstrated by hail the size of grapefruit mowing down
salarimen on the Tokyo ginza, downtown LA being wrecked by giant tornadoes, and the British
Royal family freezing to death in Balmoral. But it's not all good news, as it looks like the world is
headed for a new ice age. As soon as the news breaks, Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck are launched
into space - not because this will help avert the catastrophe, but at least it'll cheer everyone up a
bit. Seriously, though, folks, this is a film with the potential to be really rather bleak and
depressing, no matter how cheering the sight of mass death and destruction is: the tone throughout
is of futility and despair, with only the faintest (and implausible) glimmerings of hope near the
end.
But, this being a studio movie, the film-makers break the glass on the 'In case of
emergency' script box and pull out that trusty old plotline, the troubled father-son
relationship. This is the human story going on in the foreground as millions meet agonising deaths
somewhere off in the distance, and it's all about Jack (played by Dennis 'Like Harrison Ford
only cheaper' Quaid), a maverick palaeo-climatologist (yes, another movie about one of those),
who predicts the whole disaster but is wilfully ignored by the wicked and greedy American
government (any resemblance to the current administration is, of course, entirely amusing). But
Jack has more important problems to worry about than the collapse of civilisation as we know it.
He has to see about fixing up his relationship with his teenage son Sam (played, rather somnolently,
by Jake Gyllenhaal from City Slickers). As this could prove tricky if Sam turns into a
corpsicle, off Jack treks to the frozen wastes of New York, where Sam is trapped with his geeky
friends, his girlfriend (Emily Rossum), and a few other appropriately
socially-and-ethnically-diverse survivors. The film doesn't really go into details about why Jack
bothers going in person, as all he does on arrival is radio for help - something I doubt you need to
be a maverick palaeo-climatologist to do.
Yes, sorry, I've sort of given the end away there, but this isn't a deep or challenging narrative
in any way. Not to put too fine a point on it, the script of this movie stinks in all sorts of ways. It
is, for one thing, toe-curlingly sentimental in the most obvious and glutinous way: there's even a
little boy with leukaemia, included for no apparent reason except to try and coax an 'Ahhhh' out of
the audience. Fine actors like Ian Holm and Adrian Lester (Mickey 'Bricks' Stone in Hustle) stumble unwittingly into this stuff, thrash around helplessly for a while, and then vanish despairingly out of sight. (The script also clearly can't decide whether burning books in order to survive is justified or not.)
It's very clear that this is a film with A Message About Global Warming but it's caught
between its desire to be ecologically aware and the requirements of a big summer movie. As a
result its credibility suffers - the meteorology seems incredibly suspect to me, and I'm usually so
oblivious to the weather I can't even tell when to bring the washing in. And even then the film
really struggles to provide the small-scale action and excitement that's the meat of this sort of
adventure, eventually reduced to contriving sequences where characters are chased down corridors
by wolves or nasty low-pressure fronts. The special effects are undeniably spectacular,
but nearly all the big moments happen in the first half of the movie, and even then they're
impressive rather than actually exciting. (And you can't help but suspect that if only the writers
could have thought of a way for global warming to cause volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, we'd
have those in the movie too!)
But the film shows flashes of wit on occasion, and it's novel to see a summer movie that so
clearly wants to be socially aware, even if it goes about articulating this in such a stunningly crass
and obvious way. I can't honestly claim to have been swept off my feet by The Day After
Tomorrow, it's too stolid, clichéd and silly for that. But if you like watching catastrophes it
will hold your attention. And, as I said, as blockbusters go this is something a bit different - but
different isn't necessarily better, as this movie proves.
