Directed by:
Roland EmmerichScreenplay:
Jeffrey NachmanoffCinematography:
Ueli SteigerComposer:
Harald KloserCast:
Dennis Quaid, Jake Gyllenhaal, Ian Holm, Emmy Rossum, Sela Ward, Dash Mihok, Kenneth Welsh, Jay O. Sanders, Austin Nichols, Perry King, Nestor Serrano (more)Plots(1)
When global warming triggers the onset of a new Ice Age, tornadoes flatten Los Angeles, a tidal wave engulfs New York City and the entire Northern Hemisphere begins to freeze solid. Now, climatologist Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid), his son Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal) and a small band of survivors must ride out the growing superstorm and stay alive in the face of an enemy more powerful and relentless than any they've ever encountered: Mother Nature! (official distributor synopsis)
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Reviews (11)
My beloved Roland "Americ" Emmerich is back, and I have to admit, I'm a little disappointed. Unfortunately, The Day After Tomorrow is not as beautifully stupid as Godzilla or Independence Day, nor does it have the true spirit of capitalist realism; it's just an average product from the disaster film factory. The brisk first half of the film is held together by great tricks and dynamic editing, but in the second half the director takes over control and proves once again that when he has to shoot with actors without the support of digital technology, there are some gaps in his work. The main faces are bland, the dialogues are half-assed (see the one about Nietzsche, which is supposed to indicate how much a more educated American viewer knows about the legend of world philosophy), this time pathos tries to avoid the national aspects – strangely quite successfully – but still has the gift of inadvertently entertaining (Who is it? – MY DAD :o))). Technically, it works well, it's nice to look at, but the impression is killed by the protracted and considerably dull second half of the film. All they had to do was add a little exaggeration and cut down the evident ecological moralizing... and The Day After Tomorrow might even have been a slightly above-average piece of eye candy. The way it is, it looks nice and amounts to average nothing with BIG effects.
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Emmerich knows his stuff. With compelling visuals, likeable characters, a few tornadoes and a tidal wave, he manages to deliver so much sincere cinematic fun that you can't be mad at how childish it is. As far as entertainment value goes, The Day After Tomorrow isn't bad, everything looks great, it oozes the requisite dose of fatality, and the two hours pass by in a flurry of tried-and-true genre clichés, with Emmerich-esque gems that fly by faster than you can say frost. Compared to that, the story is abysmal. Once again, the heart of it all is the standard epicentre of Hollywood – Manhattan, with the situation elsewhere in the world only vaguely referred to through a newscast –, dumb people running away from huge torrents of water or getting a freezing door slammed in the faces if they're not interesting. If you only want to have fun, you will be able to overlook these "small details", but I have to stick with 3*, if only because I gave four to the much more entertaining and wholesome 2012. 65%
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Turning off your brain and not looking for any meaning to it is the way to approach what Emmerich presents in his two-hour disaster vision of the coarsest grain. Although it might irritate climatologists, why get upset when he serves us a picture of thousands of Americans begging to enter Mexico? At that moment, it is necessary to have a hearty laugh and lightly acknowledge that there is no more American American than this defector German, who spends high budgets like the biggest snob and yet unabashedly winks at the audience, almost begging them to enjoy the ride with him. Serving up a few remarkable special effects sequences pleasantly elevates the dose of patriotism, which could knock down an elephant, and it's necessary to handle it with an eye roll and a loud chuckle. The perfect sabotage of Hollywood!
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“Well, that’s the ice age for you..." Dr. Emmet Brown might have said. The Day After Tomorrow is a success in terms of special effects and completely empty in terms of ideas. Lots of clichés and lameness. On the other hand, it has a pretty solid storytelling pace. If you’re looking forward to a popcorn movie where you have a few laughs at the expense of the creators and don’t fall asleep due to pure boredom, The Day After Tomorrow is just the movie for you.
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Roland Emmerich and his umpteenth variation on disaster/end of the world. The first half is certainly better than the second half, in which not much happens in terms of catastrophic action, but even so, I could probably imagine more from a 2-hour disaster than "just" one flood and one frost. The second half is more or less standing still and finishing the fates of the individual characters, so it doesn't warm up that much, which is a pity. Visually it's an "okay" thing for that time, but nowadays it doesn't stick out much. Acting-wise it's also a good average, but what annoyed me a lot are sometimes extremely illogical bullshit, that takes the viewer for a total idiot (like the frost progression in the last half hour, which went meter by meter and the characters ran away from it lol...). In the end, I was probably expecting a bigger bang considering how the film is being praised and the director's sonorous name, but it was nothing but a weaker average that stumbles on a totally awkward ending that doesn't really explain anything and where all this nature stuff just stops all by itself.
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