The Day After Tomorrow

I'm surprised that I've only seen the film today, which was quite big for its time. Of the actors, I liked Dennis Quaid and the young Jake Gyllenhaal. The disaster scenes are decently gripping and gritty, and the scene with the aggressive wolves is great. I had fun. 80%. (05/10/2017)

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. (28/03/2024)

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. (02/06/2004)

“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. (28/05/2004)

Leaving aside the obvious fact that the processes of flow change and cooling that Emmerich describes in this film are long-term and span many decades (OK, exaggeration, I'll take it), the rest of the story is the essence of everything that is wrong with contemporary Hollywood: the tired clichés, the boring to tedious predictability of everything that happens on screen, the shoddy psychology of the cookie-cutter characters on the level of a literary attempts of a ten-year-old. The result is an unhealthy toying with the intelligence and tolerance of the normally thinking viewer. EMMERICH, GET OUT!!!! PS: To rate a film with a few stars just because it has great visual effects seems misguided to me. Nowadays, good special effects are par for the course, not an exception. (03/12/2005)