Amateur Movie Review - Would You See This?

THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW

It must have seemed a risky venture to be the first disaster movie to whack New York since 9/11, especially for the director of ‘Independence Day’, with that movie’s Empire State Building and White House money shots. How could a fake tragedy compare to the horrors of that day? ‘Day After’ makes the grade – LA being leveled by mega-tornadoes and New York being flooded remind and reinforce the horrors of those REAL newscasts. One scene especially is reminiscent of the dust and debris cloud that went through lower Manhattan that day.

There is a slight niggle that the movie is sanitized from the true horror such an event would cause – there are no couples holding hands on the jump down – but that is more an indictment on how graphic our news has become, rather than how ‘real’ a movie should be.

The disaster scenes are impressive and truly ramp up the wow-factor. The scene of Americans crossing the Rio Grande could have been iconic if not the fact that this is a summer blockbuster movie (what, us iconic?), and scenes from the international space station made me think of the cosmonauts stuck on Soyuz as the Soviet Union ceased to exist.

But, apart from a rescue effort for the British Royal family stuck at Balmoral, and a crusty old Scottish scientist, this is yet again a very Amero-centric movie. Which may be a comment on the accepted wisdom that global warming is mainly America’s fault, but in these global disaster movies, surely something interesting happens to non-Americans as well?

Dennis Quaid does his everyman role quite sufficiently, and Jake Gyllenhall is the earnest young man with a crush on the girl – similar to Tobey Maguire in ‘Spiderman’ – but the other characters are straight out of stereotype central. The Girl, The Competition for The Girl, The Geek, The Earnest Doctor – but hey, this is a disaster movie, crammed so full of CGI that the actors no doubt felt squeezed.

Despite the makers of this movie saying they wanted to make people think more of global warming and the consequences, by making the political figures so close to certain Administration stereotypes, they may have missed their mark. The messages included in the movie are too obvious, preachy and make you think of a diet version Michael Moore movie – liberals will still be baying for Dick Cheney’s blood, conservatives will still see the liberal bias of Hollywood, and neither camp will have any minds changed.

Sit back, enjoy the CGI, witness the disasters, but leave the political brain at home. Any environmental messages in this movie have all been said before, ad nauseum. Use 9/11 as a reference point instead.