The Day After Tomorrow (spoilers warning)
Posted: Sat May 29, 2004 2:29 am
I saw it this morning. I had some nachos and a cherry coke to snack on during the movie. The only good thing about the movie I can say is that those were the tastiest nachoes and the most refreshing cherry coke I ever had.
The movie was overly preachy (yes, global warming sucks, we know this, its all caused by those damned consumer culture countries too) when it showed the 'reformed'/'humbled' vice president denouncing his poor policy decisions which led to the crisis and when the astronauts were looking out the porthole at Earth after the Killer Storm and remarked about "having never seen the sky so clear" - as if the mass death that happened from this storm was a good, cleansing kind of genocide - I felt like standing and saying "Amen, brother!"
When I go to see a flick like this, I want to see an Irwin Allen kind of Disaster Flick. Something along the lines of 'The Poseidon Adventure' or even 'Volcano', though it wasn't an Irwin Allen - it was up to those standards. 'The Day After Tomorrow' had some nice special effects, it was obvious that quite a bit of money had been spent on those, I wish that at least one-tenth of the special effects budget had been spent on the script. See, the trick in any fantastic movie, either science fiction or fantasy, is maintaining the audiences suspension of disbelief in the events happening on the screen. If the actions and events are too unbelievable, then the story fails. I'll touch on a few of my favorite gaffs.
1) The wolves. Now it isn't bad enough that Our Heroes are trying to get supplies from a Russian ship that is ice-locked nearby, they also have to fend off a quartet of arctic wolves who have escaped from the zoo. How they survived a few days of flooding and killing cold in Manhattan and then managed to zero in on Our Heroes is pushing it. But hey, I guess you just can't have an arctic survival setting without a few wolves - is old Russian tradition....
2) The characters of the Scientist's Wife and the Heroic Self-Sacrificing Assisstant had no real purpose in the movie. The Scientist's Wife did not help move the plot along or illustrate the dangerous nature of this Killer Storm, she was just some extra eye-candy to ensure that the women in the audience didn't feel left out of the story by not having a character to relate to. The Heroic Self-Sacrificing Assisstant had as much purpose in the story as socks on a rooster, he dies to save the others and the main characters just go on without a second thought, after the obligatory anguished face on glass moment - he might as well have been a redshirt from Star Trek.
3) The politics. I sincerely doubt that Mexico would welcome refugees from the United States unless they were bringing with them as much of their wealth and industrial capacity as could be shipped. It seems more like the grounds for a war then a peaceful coexistance being invade by several million Americans looking for a new home.
4) the science seems questionable, but I am still researching this one and so will say nothing.
Last but not least, one of my pet peeves. The space station was tumbling. A new thing for cinematographers is to have objects in space spinning and moving to show that they that they are IN SPACE. This just makes it look like the ship or station has a drunken redneck at the steering wheel because it has no attitude control to provide stability.
I think that if you want to see this movie, then you should rent it on DVD or see a matinee or wait for the dollar theatre.
The movie was overly preachy (yes, global warming sucks, we know this, its all caused by those damned consumer culture countries too) when it showed the 'reformed'/'humbled' vice president denouncing his poor policy decisions which led to the crisis and when the astronauts were looking out the porthole at Earth after the Killer Storm and remarked about "having never seen the sky so clear" - as if the mass death that happened from this storm was a good, cleansing kind of genocide - I felt like standing and saying "Amen, brother!"
When I go to see a flick like this, I want to see an Irwin Allen kind of Disaster Flick. Something along the lines of 'The Poseidon Adventure' or even 'Volcano', though it wasn't an Irwin Allen - it was up to those standards. 'The Day After Tomorrow' had some nice special effects, it was obvious that quite a bit of money had been spent on those, I wish that at least one-tenth of the special effects budget had been spent on the script. See, the trick in any fantastic movie, either science fiction or fantasy, is maintaining the audiences suspension of disbelief in the events happening on the screen. If the actions and events are too unbelievable, then the story fails. I'll touch on a few of my favorite gaffs.
1) The wolves. Now it isn't bad enough that Our Heroes are trying to get supplies from a Russian ship that is ice-locked nearby, they also have to fend off a quartet of arctic wolves who have escaped from the zoo. How they survived a few days of flooding and killing cold in Manhattan and then managed to zero in on Our Heroes is pushing it. But hey, I guess you just can't have an arctic survival setting without a few wolves - is old Russian tradition....
2) The characters of the Scientist's Wife and the Heroic Self-Sacrificing Assisstant had no real purpose in the movie. The Scientist's Wife did not help move the plot along or illustrate the dangerous nature of this Killer Storm, she was just some extra eye-candy to ensure that the women in the audience didn't feel left out of the story by not having a character to relate to. The Heroic Self-Sacrificing Assisstant had as much purpose in the story as socks on a rooster, he dies to save the others and the main characters just go on without a second thought, after the obligatory anguished face on glass moment - he might as well have been a redshirt from Star Trek.
3) The politics. I sincerely doubt that Mexico would welcome refugees from the United States unless they were bringing with them as much of their wealth and industrial capacity as could be shipped. It seems more like the grounds for a war then a peaceful coexistance being invade by several million Americans looking for a new home.
4) the science seems questionable, but I am still researching this one and so will say nothing.
Last but not least, one of my pet peeves. The space station was tumbling. A new thing for cinematographers is to have objects in space spinning and moving to show that they that they are IN SPACE. This just makes it look like the ship or station has a drunken redneck at the steering wheel because it has no attitude control to provide stability.
I think that if you want to see this movie, then you should rent it on DVD or see a matinee or wait for the dollar theatre.
At some point some of the main characters must have realized how bad this was going to be (als Tim Robbins in Mission to mars, with his happy face death) and simply disapeared (sometimes not even with a contrived plot twist). And then the preachyness