The Day After Tomorrow

I can't recall the last time I saw a movie that starts out dumb and gets slightly smarter towards the end. It's so often the case that the reverse occurs.

To a certain extent TDAT could be written off as Independence Day with snow, yet the lowest common denominator formula is here offset by a cheeringly sardonic sense of humour - norteamericanos flooding across the Rio Grande as desperate refugees and debates about whether Nietzsche would make a worthy member of the NYC Library bonfire. (If the South were to experience a disaster of this magnitude would the North's borders open so easily?)

If there is one big weakness beyond the template itself, it is the muddled way the movie tries to depict how the crisis (and the sense of crisis) develops through reports in the media. And then there's a stage where the media is simply forgotten. Millions have died in America's largest city and the gathered officials eventually get a call telling them that something's probably up in New York. Not even a CNN text alert! Having said all that, the recent tsunami did show that even in the context of instantaneous globalised communications scientists can sit powerless in expensive yet isolated research facilities watching the disaster unfold as a stream of data.

Perhaps the scale of the disaster and the human tragedy involved here is just too huge to fit within the format of the two hour blockbuster. You could almost build a movie franchise or a spin-off TV series out of the situations suggested by this new ice age, but I suspect the problem would be that this scenario presents too great a threat to the cherished notion that the proper future of humanity is an American one. You can't just re-group the survivors and kick weather butt like you can with them darned extraterrestrials.

There are several hints of more complex dialogue and situations struggling to wriggle out of the blockbuster straight-jacket. The students trapped in the Library begin to ask themselves what it will be like to live now that the future that they were preparing themselves for no longer exists. We are also implicitly asked to consider whether the first book ever printed is somehow more valuable that the life of an unexceptional human being.

There are certainly also plenty of scenes of the sort that Frode would typically describe as "beautiful": Huge waves surging into New York, and then the ten degree drop per second that the eye of the storm portends. A Russian tanker winding its way between partly sunken skyscrapers.

The inclusion of some Brits made possible that rarity in Hollywood, an ordinary black guy with a white spouse. Cor blimey. Unfortunately the black roles on the other side of the Atlantic were all straight out of central casting - city cop, hobo brudder and brainy nerd. These Brits apart, the effort to include the rest of the northern hemisphere in the story is predictably pretty feeble - three English scientists in Scotland, toasting England with scotch as they freeze to death. Japan has a cameo - a deadly hailstorm in Tokyo which seems unconnected with the rest of the narrative and represents I think, a missed opportunity to bring some real horror genre- style escalating tension to these early scenes.

There is an underlying assumption that Canada is completely fucked.

LA, the ugly sprawl with so few postcard images is given very short thrift. Following my recent visit I'd say it is a richly deserved fate too. I chuckled as the tornado chewed up the Hollywood sign, but the comedy was undoubtedly intentional there. Few will have exactly gasped with horror.