The Day After Tomorrow - Earth Day Review

As you may remember reading from my reviews, my first exposure to disaster movies when I was a kid was through Twister. I remember being always wigged out by what kind of disasters we could run into that would easily leave us dead in a matter of minutes. But as I grew up and became more aware of what other disasters were out and about, I became more curious about them instead. In a morbid sense, I was interested in learning how they all formed and what kind of wreckage they could’ve left behind on all the people and areas affected by them. My inner sense of analytics for the storms, rather than the innate fear I felt over them, grew alongside what I maintained since childhood.

If there’s one disaster movie that helped nurture my curiosity over the storms rather than my fear of them, I would point to The Day After Tomorrow as the primary reason behind it.

Does that mean it’s a great disaster movie? Upon revisiting this film, I wouldn’t go that far. I’ve always had a soft spot for this movie since I saw it in theaters over 21 years ago, but even I acknowledge some things about it make it a bit rough around the edges. But that doesn’t mean that some of what it did well or could have done well isn’t there. Let me go into a little more detail about why that is.

The story is about a he comes to regret his mistakes named Jack Hall, who was somewhat renowned for his expeditions and research on potential climate changes and what could have occurred at any point in the world that would’ve triggered a detour away from Mother Nature’s intended course. The latest series of such circumstances that he paid attention to was the melting of the polar ice caps, which played a part in the rising level of water, which in turn disrupted the North Atlantic Current. As demonstrated by his seminar in New Delhi, India, he was met with a mixed response, particularly by the US Vice President Raymond Becker, who dismissed those claims and the likelihood of them encouraging any responsive disasters.

I’ll get into that very shortly.

On a personal note, however, Jack also had to endure the trauma of being estranged from his wife and eldest son, Sam, who was off to college, and how his devotion to his work affected their relationship.

While in New Delhi, Jack met a Scottish oceanographer named Terry Rapson, who later clued him in on some alarming news: several patterns from across the globe hinted at a significant natural divergent from what’s usually expected, and they started aligning with what Jack Hall said in New Delhi about the North Atlantic Current. What was initially dismissed as just a theory slowly became a horrifying reality, and by the time that disruption took hold, what came of it were storms of foreign and cataclysmic proportions.

New Delhi? Battling a severe snowstorm. Tokyo, Japan? Taking a beating by softball-sized hailstones. Los Angeles? Ravaged by a tornado family. New York City? Facing torrential downpours until it finally escalated into an incoming tsunami. 

But to make matters worse for Jack Hall, Sam went with some of his college buddies to New York City to partake in the Scholastic Decathlon as the rains started intensifying. Soon enough, as everybody caught onto the disastrous trends of the storms and how much damage they unleashed on the affected areas, Sam and his friends managed to avoid the death-inducing elements that literally washed through New York City and consequently became trapped, along with several others, in the New York Public Library.

If you thought the storms I described were bad enough, they were only the beginning. What would’ve come after that were formations of three hurricane-like storms that would’ve expanded all across the Northern Hemisphere, and once they reached their utmost formation, the ‘eyes of the storms’ would’ve undergone a severe temperature drop of -150℉. If anyone so much as stepped outside, they would have frozen to death in seconds. Jack Hall alluded to this possibility in his scientific briefings, saying that, should it happen, it would have been the first storm of its kind in 10,000 years, and worse still, it would have triggered a new ice age. As these climactic catastrophes began to take hold, the American citizens planned to flee down to Mexico, where refugee camps would have been set up and waiting for them.

In fact, Americans immigrating to Mexico? There’s something you don’t hear every day.

Yet, with all this in mind, Jack Hall ventured out with his science buddies, Frank and a newbie named Jason, in the middle of this severe weather, first by car, then by foot, to track down Sam and his friends, despite their destination being among the designated spots in the Northern Hemisphere that were about to be subjected to the climatic moment of the incoming storms. 

How would the entire world have prepared for the incoming storms for which they came potentially unprepared? And would Jack Hall and his fellow scientists have braved the elements long and surely enough to finally reach Sam and his friends before any one of them died?

Looking back on this movie, as I was entering middle school, there were plenty of things about this film that drew me to it when it came out. 

Even though it’s not likely for such storms to be as severe as they were in the movie, I was more compelled by the creativity of the storms rummaging about and what unsuspecting areas they would most likely have struck. How would that have affected the rest of the world? How would the citizens have reacted to them? Of course, I was more drawn to the variety and the surreal nature of the storms wreaking havoc across the world the way they have in this film. Maybe I was aware enough of the impossible nature of such storms as what I’ve seen in the movie for me to find this idea intriguing enough for me to want to see it when it first hit theaters. 

Of course, as for what I’ve seen in the movie, there are some parts of it that did seem unbalanced as a disaster movie, and both the duller elements in this movie and the long-lasting reputation were enough for me to look back on this disaster film as being just subpar compared to what other disaster movies of this type have accomplished. Ironically, this film was directed by Roland Emmerich, the guy who did Independence Day, and here he was, with the main enemy being Mother Nature herself rather than a gang of incoming aliens. From what I have seen of his talents in this movie, he did have a knack for highlighting the disastrous nature of what came down to lay harm upon humanity, and I feel that he came pretty close to achieving that with the human side of the story. But it was still not enough to make this the next Independence Day as it tried to be, or, in my opinion, as it could have been. With that out of the way, let me point out what stuck out to me in both the right and the wrong ways.

First, I want to pay attention to the biggest problem with the movie: its scientific credibility. When I first heard of global warming, I remember hearing of it here in The Day After Tomorrow. But now, I don’t think this would’ve been the proper movie to introduce people to global warming – movies like An Inconvenient Truth would’ve been more fitting – because the scientific hypotheses explaining the disasters in this movie were too beyond belief for me. Yes, the melting of the polar ice caps would’ve disrupted the North Atlantic Current, as it would in real life. Still, the idea of it unleashing a series of storms on a catastrophic scale all across the globe, particularly in the Northern Hemisphere, until they finally culminated in a trio of mega hurricanes unleashing what is equivalent to a new ice age? Or, to put it another way, a massive case of global warming triggering the opposite effect on the Earth? Watching it now, I can see a lot of things wrong with that viewpoint on the possibilities of such major storms being let loose upon the world with this in mind. Now, I’m not one to suggest judging disaster films based on their scientific credibility or know-how, but even if you can tweak around with some of the scientific natures behind how Mother Nature works, it would have been a lot more acceptable if it was treated like it was a regular thing. But here, I could have spotted the errors right away, and that’s usually a big red flag when it comes to scientific movies or disaster movies. With Independence Day and Twister, I could have bought into the idea of how the disastrous forces came forth and how they could have been brought down or averted. Why? Because in each film, it sounded scientifically plausible enough for me to believe it. But here, the scientific elements introduced throughout the movie felt like a huge stretch and made me not buy into the idea of such mega-storms taking shape across the globe the way the characters said they would.

There’s also one sequence where Sam, while stuck in the New York Public Library with his friends, came out after being submerged in frigid water. After he was brought inside by Laura, Sam quickly undressed as Laura, while still wearing her suit and coat, quickly embraced him hard, saying that she was going to give him body heat so his body would continue to function and not give in to the extreme cold. However, I remember reading that both people involved would’ve had to strip themselves down for the mutual body heat to work properly. So, since these characters were still in college, and the actors would likely have been in the same age group back then, this could probably be excused as an act of cinematic modesty instead of as a scientific inaccuracy.

But now, let’s talk about con number two: the characters themselves. Again, as I pointed out in my Twister review, most disaster movies tend to make the mistake of prioritizing the disasters over the characters who had any direct involvement with them. Sometimes, they were written with just enough of a dilemma for them to arouse a slight interest for them as they tried to work their way through the disasters they dealt with. But whenever the movie was not paying attention to the disasters, it didn’t seem like they did enough research or homework to know why the characters would’ve been worth getting invested in outside of them having to work their way through all the disasters that occurred beside them. And sadly, Jack Hall and the others were no exception. For example, some of the people I’ve seen in designated areas like New Delhi, Tokyo, and especially Los Angeles were introduced in the movie to demonstrate what damages the disasters in question unleashed upon them and their designated areas. None of the characters I saw in these locations were there to elicit an emotional response but rather to exemplify the severity of the disasters. And the guys who were subject to this kind of destruction in Los Angeles? I remember them the most, and I kept thinking that maybe they could have been a little more interesting as characters, primarily if they had known someone like Jack Hall and the others. But as is, this is where I felt like The Day After Tomorrow made some of the same mistakes in sensationalizing their deaths because of the disasters too much. And with Jack Hall, his family, and getting the family back together, especially by finding his son? It’s interesting how, with disaster movies, the main characters’ most prominent issues besides the disasters seem to concern family dilemmas, whether it be family estrangement, divorce, or what have you. Even 2012 had it where the main character’s dilemmas dealt with family estrangement.

However, even if that was the case with The Day After Tomorrow, some story threads could have used a little more work to give The Day After Tomorrow the more human edge that could have benefited it in the long run. For example, look at Sam Hall and his need to go to college with his friends. At one point in the movie, it was said that Sam Hall had the hots for Laura, a fellow college classmate, and he wanted to join the Scholastic Decathlon to get close to her. That left me wondering what their relationship was like during college. Did Sam decide to get to know her on a whim and join the competition for that? Or did they know each other for a while before the disasters occurred, and did he feel compelled to want to join her because of how close he was with her? It is nuggets of goodness like these that Roland Emmerich and the writers could have made into viable assets to benefit The Day After Tomorrow and unleash the human angle it could have achieved. But instead, the devotion to the characters and why they did what they did felt MIA here. 

However, even with those two massive flaws out of the way, let’s go over what I deem as its greatest strengths.

It goes without saying, but one of the film’s biggest accomplishments lies in its visuals. As I said, when I was a little kid, I found the idea of seeing what kind of mega-storms would wreak havoc across the world and where they would occur most stimulating. And as far as the visuals went, this movie did not fall short of any of that. If anything, the movie went all out with the visuals on the storms, and it made me buy into the possibility of storms being unleashed where it would have been unlikely for them to occur based on the visuals alone. You know that they’ve done a good job when the visuals helped me buy into just a fraction of that idea even if I disagreed with the rest of it and that the foundational values of how it came to be left a lot to be desired. Whenever the regular weather occurred, like snowstorms or rainstorms, they all went about as regularly as any major catastrophic storm would’ve lunged forth. But when the stakes got even higher and escalated into a series of tornadoes or a tsunami coming in to hit New York City, or even when everyone and everything started to freeze around them, like in New York City, they were so sudden and so caught the characters off guard that it made me believe that they were undergoing the beginning of a possible new ice age. And I have to give kudos to the visual artists for making it all possible, especially for the younger me.

I was also blown away, in a manner of speaking, by the tornadoes that ran rampant throughout Los Angeles. Because I was so nostalgic about Twister when The Day After Tomorrow came out, this sequence alone felt like the closest thing I ever had known to a sequel to Twister long before the actual sequel came along. Too bad that this time, there was no Bill Paxton around to offset them.

The second major pro that gets overlooked a lot in a movie like this is the actors’ performances.

Let me explain. Yes, the script could’ve been better regarding the characters, their motivations, and their overall contributions to the movie. However, what the script failed to deliver, the actors more than made up for with their performances. Whenever I read their expressions, thought-processing, and how they reacted to the calamities erupting around them, the actors delivered such expressions with enough nuance and humanity for me to feel the slightest twinge of concern for them. Even if the script did not do enough with the characters as I would’ve liked to have seen it do, the actors still did not show any shortcomings in delivering the emotional resonance necessary for me to hope for their safety when they were caught in the crosshairs of the disasters when they were rummaging about the globe. For that reason, many of the film’s actors breathed into their roles what the script could also have done. The actors did not skimp on how they translated the characters as they’d have seen them. Their performances are what made me believe that the characters had a lot of potential in them and could have been something and someone a little more, especially for the sake of the film, had the script paid more attention to the character side of the story and not just the disaster side of the story.

Let’s begin with Dennis Quaid. He took Jack Hall’s character and played his role with a level of expertise and confidence to help elevate his character into someone you’d consider well-meaning yet still had a ways to go. While, technically, it can be true of his scientific research, despite it all turning out to be true, that would have been more accurate of his relationship with his family, particularly his son, Sam. I could’ve felt his commitment as a climatologist to alert as many people as quickly as possible about the incoming dangers that the incoming storms posed for everyone. Once his commitment to his family became tested, that’s when Jack showed his inner commitment to reach his son in New York City, if for no other reason than to atone for all his past neglect to them and how he tended to be more married to his work than to his family.

As for Jake Gyllenhaal as Sam Hall, outside of coincidentally carrying some of the exact likenesses as Dennis Quaid, and thus, Jack Hall, he usually responded to unforeseen circumstances around him with a hint of naïveté to him, and also with attempted confidence to ensure those around him, especially his friends, that he was in complete control of himself. However, it seemed as if he expressed just a touch of a lack of self-confidence when he was around his father. Yet, when he was around his friends, he felt more comfortable doing what he knew was right, even in the face of danger. I admire what Gyllenhaal infused in his character, mainly because everything that Sam Hall was at his age, Gyllenhaal expressed quite regularly, as if he genuinely felt how college-aged people would’ve reacted or responded to any unforeseen circumstances.

Even if I had known very little about the professor that Jack met in New Delhi, Terry Rapsom, what Iam Holm gave to his role was enough for me to have bought into the possibilities of him being a knowledgeable guy with keen insight on natural forces as Jack Hall did, in addition to other bits and pieces that would’ve served most crucial in Jack Hall’s research and conclusions. He may not have played as huge a role in the movie as I thought he did, but what he did express in his role was enough for me to remember his sensibility and friendliness when it came to his companionship with Jack Hall.

Emmy Rossum felt surprisingly lavish as Laura Chapman. Sure, it’s no Oscar-worthy performance, but her expressions, mannerisms, and ways of reacting to other people and their dilemmas, especially with Sam or when she succumbed to her sickness brought about by her character’s blood poisoning, all made this otherwise uninteresting pretty face suddenly light up the screen whenever she was around. I can’t explain it; there must have been something about her performance that elevated her character above where she would regularly have remained.

Sela Ward, like Emmy Rossum, might not have unleashed a torrent of talent when it came to paying her character, Lucy Hall, but what she did express of her character elevated her generally more modest character into a realm of evident respectability. Outside of honing the concern she would’ve felt about Jack, despite all their troubles together, and especially for Sam when he was stranded in New York City, she also displayed her sense of professionalism surprisingly well. It was most noticeable when Lucy, as a nurse, went over to check up on her patient, Peter, who underwent chemotherapy and could barely read outside of the pictures he caught in Peter Pan. Whenever he needed Lucy’s help, Ward just honed her concern for him like a trustworthy nurse would’ve, which made sense, considering that she was a mother herself and might have recalled what Sam was like when he was Peter’s age.

I’m also fond of Arjay Smith as Brian Parks, Sam’s college friend. He seemed a tad preoccupied with his college knowledge and the possible factors that concerned the storm conditions he and his friends dealt with. Yet, for all his alleged cockiness, he still expressed it all and his mannerisms with restraint, and it made him feel more modest and levelheaded when it came to assessing the unusual conditions he and his friends found themselves in.

Ustin Nichols truly excelled in bringing J.D., the college student who came from one of Sam’s college team’s opposing teams, to life with enough humanity for me to buy into his dilemmas as a young human being, just like Sam, Laura, and Brian, rather than just another college opponent. After hearing J.D. talk about his younger brother being stranded where he could not have reached him, that was when he expressed more vulnerability where it counted. From that point onward, Nichols helped J.D. feel like he was more on the same team as Sam, Laura, and Brian, but more out of survival-induced teamwork.

Even Glenn Plummer as Luther, the homeless guy in New York who carried his dog around, I remember just what a slightly intriguing character he made him. All he was was just a homeless guy searching around for food or shelter, especially for his dog, whom he called Buddha. Even if there wasn’t much to write home about this character narratively, Plummer’s acting somehow surprised me with what he had pulled out of his role, which was minimal as it was.

To describe the characters in this movie, let me do so this way, and not just because it’s Earth Day. All those characters had the potential to be handed over to us as a fully grown fruit tree. Instead, they were handed over to us as saplings.

Now, there are two more things I have to pay attention to in this movie. They are half-pro and half-con, but they are still worth noting here.

To start with, let’s talk about the more disagreeable characters in this movie. 

First, US Vice President Raymond Becker disagreed with Jack Hall’s claims about a possible string of storms and, by extension, a potential forthcoming ice age due to the disruption of the North Atlantic Current. As I said earlier, I ironically agreed with this character because of how unlikely I found it to be. It’s almost like his complaints about Jack Hall’s claims aligned with mine. However, even as the storms went on and raged about, Becker was still defiant about this, not just because he was stubborn but because he was more concerned about his fellow American people. Even if the disasters were a thing, he wanted to ensure that his fellow Americans were as safe as possible as the storms started lunging around them.

There’s also the security guard in New York City, Campbell, who decided to inform everybody about the aircraft that came in to carry people down south to Mexico for shelter. He and everybody else took that chance simply because they thought it was a guaranteed passage into safety from all the disasters as they started to take hold, despite Sam’s arguments about the outside temperatures dropping significantly to the point of being far below freezing. This occurred after Jack had warned Sam about the temperature drop beforehand.

So, why could this be a good thing?

As I elaborated in my review of what I’m about to highlight next, some disaster movies made the mistake of adding villain characters where they did not belong just to milk more drama for the main characters when the disasters were not already doing that. 

And yet, one of the disaster movies I’ve seen that was surprisingly and ingeniously sneaky about it was Twisters, the sequel to the 90s film. Yes, the movie’s villains’ schemes and actions were downright disgusting. Yet, it never went so far as to make that one of the top priorities outside of the main characters’ goal to hunt down the designated tornadoes because, for all of the villains’ atrocities, the film reminded us that the heroes had bigger fish to fry. 

What I like about both Raymond Becker and Campbell in The Day After Tomorrow is that they were never once portrayed as villainous but instead disagreeable at worst. Even though their ideologies and ways of looking at the disasters conflicted with what Jack Hall and everyone else believed, it was not out of spite or as a means to antagonize them altogether. They simply expressed different points of view, a different response to the disasters, and their ideas of hope and survival, which happened to clash with what the heroes had in mind all along. If anything, it shows that they looked at the calamities differently from the heroes but became ironically oblivious to how drastic they were until they came crashing down. By the time Raymond Becker learned about it, a good chunk of the American citizens he was concerned for may have perished from the onslaught, and it humbled him greatly. After Campbell ventured out into the frosty wastelands that used to be New York City with those who decided to follow him in the hopes of reaching the nearby planes, they learned their lesson the hard way because, by the end of the movie, they became reduced to human popsicles. The movie still went ahead to demonstrate that their deaths were all by accident and showed it as tragic rather than celebratory. 

As for the half-con, this is what I initially thought of it before retrospective insight into the scene somewhat changed my mind.

What happened was, while all the commotion went on in New York City with the rains, torrents, the tsunami, and the climactic widespread freezing, there was a tiny subplot concerning a pack of wolves who grew more agitated and fierce as they gave into their instincts and broke out of what I suspect was the Central Park Zoo. Later, as they roamed about New York City before the big freeze, they tried to hunt down Sam and his buddies as they tried to gather some medicine, specifically penicillin, for Laura, who became deathly ill after puncturing her leg in the flooded New York City and that the medicine would’ve helped combat against blood poisoning.

As to where they would’ve found it, they found it in, of all places, an incoming Russian cargo ship that breezed on into the middle of the city. On a side note, why do I feel like that arrived in the movie more as a plot device than as a possible consequence of the tsunami hitting New York City and contributing to its high tide?

On the one hand, the wolf pack barely seemed necessary other than just posing another threat for Sam and his friends to deal with and escape from before they became food for them to munch on out of desperation. However, as I let it sit, this prospect alone could have encouraged another element of The Day After Tomorrow that could also have enriched it. When humanity had evolved so much over the past 10,000 years that it established its means of survival, technology, and the know-how necessary to prepare itself against any incoming disaster, what would they have done if they were suddenly regressed into being at the same stage as every other animal in the wilderness who fought for survival? The animals always did that, and the humans were reduced to doing the same thing here. How would the humans have responded if they were to attack the animals for food or survival? I feel like this is what the wolf scene was hinting at, and that could have introduced another element to the movie that would’ve given it another semblance of life that was regrettably never fulfilled. Because of that, it makes me look at this subplot less like dead weight and more like a missed opportunity.

Another thing about this movie that always piqued me was the music by Harald Kloser. Generally, it was not too noteworthy, but at some points in the movie, the music effectively expressed the danger of the situation or the forlorn factors creeping in. Some parts of the movie were accompanied by a few female soprano notes in the background, and they helped highlight the eerie or tragic aspects of the storms at hand. As the storms were still raging on, the music reflected the urgency and borderline disbelief of witnessing such colossal storms striking down the Earth.

Now, having revisited this movie for the first time in many years and after hearing all the bad things said about it, does it make it any less of a disaster movie than I imagined it to be? Slightly so, yes. However, everything else that it did so well is still enough for me to consider this a decent disaster classic. Even the elements that had some good ideas that it could have taken advantage of are still substantial enough to potentially propel this disaster film into being something that had a lot of fun telling a story the way it meant to tell while also sharing ideas that I feel would’ve benefited this movie tremendously had more time than devoted to them.

Of course, the disasters are clearly the movie’s scene-stealers. They were imaginative. They ran rampant throughout the world. They jumpstarted the storm to end all storms. As I said, they clearly did the job of paying attention to how much damage and carnage they could have unleashed, even though these are not all that such disaster films need to prove themselves valuable as disaster films and films in general. The characters feel half-baked, and the scientific hypotheses behind the disasters are just far-fetched. However, the visuals still hold up, and the performances surprised me with how much personality the actors infused into the characters. If more research had been taken into the scientific plausibilities behind such disasters and the human characters were given a chance to leave more of an impact in the movie, I could see this movie easily becoming the next Independence Day that only Roland Emmerich could have unleashed. 

This movie’s far from the best of its kind, but I wouldn’t say it’s a ‘disaster’ disaster, for it still had enough moments of clear weather for me to appreciate it when not losing sleep over its faults.

My Rating A high C+