Disaster movies have always come with a get-out-of-jail-free card when it comes to the believability of the circumstances that generate their particular disastrous event. From volcanoes erupting in the middle of Los Angeles to earthquakes leveling whole continents, the thing that is really important is for the movie’s special effects to make sure the disaster element is as spectacular as possible, and audiences can forget a lot of the plot holes and bad dialogue that makes up the rest of the runtime. Now a 2004 Roland Emmerich-directed movie starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Dennis Quaid that brought the effects of global warming to its most extreme levels has swept away the competition to become the #1 film on Netflix in America. That movie is The Day After Tomorrow, an eco-disaster story based loosely on the book The Coming Global Superstorm by Art Bell and Whitley Strieber, which used groundbreaking CGI to destroy several cities around the world and plunge parts of the U.S. into a freezing nightmare.
Emmerich’s movies have always been about making the most visually stunning movies, even if that sometimes leaves a little to be desired in the actual plotting of the film. Following successes like Stargate and Independence Day, along with the heavily criticized 1998 version of Godzilla, Emmerich wrote and co-produced The Day After Tomorrow as well as taking on duties behind the camera. With a $125 million budget, the film had every chance of becoming a box office bomb if people didn’t buy into it, but just like many of Emmerich’s movies, the high-end action and promise of destruction on a global scale was enough to see the film make $552 million during its theatrical run. While this made the film hugely successful in financial terms, the reactions from both critics and audiences did not match its profitability.
The Day After Tomorrow opens with Paleoclimatologist Jack Hall (Quaid) discovers that melting ice caps have caused a change in the currents of the Atlantic and could be about to cause a huge climate shift. After the warnings are dismissed by the government, the predicted shift hits in the blink of an eye, sending ranging storms across continents and subsequently bringing about tidal floods, city-levelling tornadoes, and a deep freeze that turns everything it touches to ice. After this destruction, Sam Hall (Gyllenhaal), son of Jack, has to keep a small group of survivors alive in the most treacherous conditions, while Jack attempts to save him in a snowbound Manhattan.
The Day After Tomorrow is a movie with two main plot threads that it travels along with the expected moments of jeopardy and obligatory save-the-day ending. On one hand, it is the stark warning of the devastation that could be caused if the Earth decides that humans have pushed things too far with their toxic vehicles and wasting of energy, and on the other it is a story about a family rescue mission in the most dire of circumstances. The film comes with all the expected outlandish set-pieces you would expect from Emmerich, and for a lot of people – critics and audiences alike – the film is just a little too over-the-top in its execution to be taken seriously. The movie holds respective 44% and 50% scores from critics and viewers on Rotten Tomatoes, splitting opinions on both sides of the review pool. While most people are happy to admit that The Day After Tomorrow is a guilty pleasure time waster movie – something that a lot of Netflix subscribers seem to have taken to heart – they are not willing to go far enough to call it a good film. If you are all about spectacular effects and plenty of unbelievable set pieces, then The Day After Tomorrow is a film that should be on your watchlist while it is available on Netflix.
What is your favorite disaster movie? Is The Day After Tomorrow too far-fetched, or a grim vision of a possible future? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
