Review: the Day After Tomorrow
Jul. 11th, 2004 04:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andrewduckerI like Emmerich films. I saw Stargate twice at the cinema, Independence Day three times and Godzilla twice. Huge stupid B-Movies where New York gets destroyed by {random disaster of the week} are my idea of a good time.
When I first saw the trailers for The Day after Tomorrow I was happily captivated and absolutely committed to seeing the film. I re-watched the trailer on numerous occasions, convinced that this would be another high-concept study of ridiculous disaster. This may have been a mistake.
This is because once you've seen the trailer, you've seen the film. Or at least you've seen the best bits of the film. Huge whirlwinds? - check. Frozen Statue of Liberty? - check. Walls of water engulfing New York? - check. Decent actors acting serious in front of blue-screen? - check.
The film sets things up nicely (albeit with ridiculous coincidences and gratuitous stupidity - even the vice-president of the USA would have problems dismissing climate change when it snows in Delhi in summer), explodes into glorious CGI devestation and then stops dead for the following hour and a half.
Jaky Gyllenhall sits in a library, burning books because apparently burning the furniture never occurred to them. His father plods through the snow, arriving just as the storms clear, thus achieving nothing useful. The only real distraction is the race to get some antibiotics which are jealously guarded by CGI wolves (who obviously need them to tend to their own wounded), and that feels forced and unneccessary.
This film could have been vastly improved by (a) chopping half an hour out of it (b) spreading the devestation throughout more of the film and (c) focussing less on one family and showing us the effects all over the world (the Love Actually/Last Night approach). Any of these would have made it vastly more interesting and removed the need for fake emergencies.
ObQuote: Chilly, isn't it?
When I first saw the trailers for The Day after Tomorrow I was happily captivated and absolutely committed to seeing the film. I re-watched the trailer on numerous occasions, convinced that this would be another high-concept study of ridiculous disaster. This may have been a mistake.
This is because once you've seen the trailer, you've seen the film. Or at least you've seen the best bits of the film. Huge whirlwinds? - check. Frozen Statue of Liberty? - check. Walls of water engulfing New York? - check. Decent actors acting serious in front of blue-screen? - check.
The film sets things up nicely (albeit with ridiculous coincidences and gratuitous stupidity - even the vice-president of the USA would have problems dismissing climate change when it snows in Delhi in summer), explodes into glorious CGI devestation and then stops dead for the following hour and a half.
Jaky Gyllenhall sits in a library, burning books because apparently burning the furniture never occurred to them. His father plods through the snow, arriving just as the storms clear, thus achieving nothing useful. The only real distraction is the race to get some antibiotics which are jealously guarded by CGI wolves (who obviously need them to tend to their own wounded), and that feels forced and unneccessary.
This film could have been vastly improved by (a) chopping half an hour out of it (b) spreading the devestation throughout more of the film and (c) focussing less on one family and showing us the effects all over the world (the Love Actually/Last Night approach). Any of these would have made it vastly more interesting and removed the need for fake emergencies.
ObQuote: Chilly, isn't it?
