The Day After Tomorrow (2004)

"Always something to eat in the garbage!", 1 August 2006

What an annoying movie! The Day After Tomorrow is filled with every disaster movie cliché in the book. Why does there have to be a child with cancer who is too ill to move as the impending doom threatens? Why is it necessary to have people fall in love during the middle of a crisis? Why should we care about characters that are only on screen for a few minutes before they die? Why does the homeless guy know more about what's going on than most anyone else? Why did the parents in the movie have to be estranged, only to resolve their differences as the disaster strikes? Why does the Dick Cheney look-alike Vice-President, the most prominent government official, have to be such a narrow minded character? If you've seen on disaster movie, you've no doubt run into a few of these examples of the lack of originality found in The Day After Tomorrow. Most every event and character reaction to those events can be predicted with incredible accuracy.

On top of the clichés, plot points are handled in such heavy-handed fashion. Director Roland Emmerich will suddenly show scenes and events that are totally unrelated to anything that is going on. You just know the minute you discover that the wolves have escaped from the zoo that they'll inevitably come back to create an even more dangerous situation for the people in the movie. Why else would the scene of a couple of zookeepers discovering the empty cages be included in the movie? And you know the minute that one of the characters gets hurt trying to save someone that her injury will come back to haunt her. Why else would we get a quick glimpse of her bleeding underwater? As a viewer, you're literally beat over the head with these plot points in an incredibly ham-fisted manner. As I said earlier, it's all so annoying.

I suppose that if you're into CGI you might find a thing or two to enjoy. The special effects are, for the most part, well done. But the special effects completely dominate everything else. It's CGI overload. Why even bother with actors? The actors don't act in The Day After Tomorrow. They spend their time reacting to special effects that were generated long after they were finished with the movie. Once again, it's annoying.

Finally, did anyone ever think for a moment that the people trapped in the library were in any real danger? If you thought for a second that Jake Gyllenhaal or Emmy Rossum's characters were in any real danger, you've apparently never seen a movie before. Why should I care about these two character (or anyone else for that matter) when you can spot who's going to live and who's going to die 10 minutes into the movie? For the last time, it's annoying.

I'll stop here as there are really so many other annoying facets of the movie I could cover that I could write pages. I haven't scratched the surface. I've already spent more time than I should have writing about The Day After Tomorrow.

3/10