“Where will you be?”

Well, if you have any fucking sense it’ll be Troy, Shrek 2 or as far away from a cinema as humanly possible.

Unfortunately, I fell prey to marketing propaganda and deceiving trailers. It was my birthday yesterday, and I had two wishes. To see Troy again, and to watch The Day After Tomorrow. I was happy with only one of those choice. Because, well, quite frankly, this film sucks.

As per usual, our director follows the tried and tested Roland Emerich movie criteria:

• People driving cars, getting stuck in a jam and then slowly getting out to see something outrageous in the sky.
• Mass destruction.
• A black family never survives unless Will Smith is in the movie.
• At least an hour of pure CGI.
• Deus ex machina.

I’m pretty sure that Emmerich must have deluded himself with Independence Day and somehow convinced himself the success of that film was due to anything other than the fact that Will Smith was in it saying things like Oh, no. no, you are NOT shootin’ that green shit at me!

Let me explain what is needed for a thriller to work. First of all, it has to thrill. Tomorrow does that in places. But second of all, and probably most importantly, it has to be even remotely plausible. This plot is so fucking stupid, you feel like dying right there on the spot. One day everything is fine, and then within a couple of days, the face of the Earth will be completely raped by hurricanes and tidal waves that will FORM INSTANTLY.

Because a chunk of the polar ice-caps melted.

I feel stupid just writing it.

Temperatures in parts of the world could drop, but not nearly as rapidly or dramatically as portrayed in the movie. In a warmer world, additional rain at middle and high latitudes, plus melt from glaciers, will add more fresh water to the oceans. This could affect currents, such as the Gulf Stream, that transport heat north from the tropics and might result in parts of North America and Europe becoming relatively cooler. Even if this were to occur, it would take many years or decades because oceans move heat and cold much more slowly than the atmosphere

So how about no.

Ok, so meet Doctor Jack Hall. He’s the token mis-understood genius (think Jeff Goldblum in Independence Day) who realises that within god knows how short a time, the world is going to be ravaged, in the wake of some really, really fucked up weather. One of the eyes of the mega storm, located over New York City.

So in light of this new found information, what’s the first thing you do? Head to an air-raid shelter? Talk to the president? No. How about, driving your son to the airport so he can go to New York for a high-school academic decathalon.

Jack then of course tries to warn everyone, but as per a billion movies before it, he’s not listened to.

His son, Sam of course gets trapped in a library with a bunch of geeks and drifters, and so to keep warm they burn all the books there. Cool, except for the fact that there is A SHIT LOAD OF WOODEN FURNITURE there to burn instead. It’s ok, they’ll use that for making snow shoes.

Oh didn’t I mention? Yeah, they needed snow shoes to get some penicillin for Jake Gylenhaal’s crush, who cut a massive chunk of her leg off on a piece of metal, but thought better of telling anyone about it, and was able to walk without limping despite missing most of her shin. Here is where we begin one of the major rules of big shitty Hollywood popcorn flicks, that squatting in a crowded room during the armageddon will always create romance. For the next half an hour or so, Jake Gylenhaal tries to figure out how to tell Emmy Rossum he loves her like a fat kid loves cake, because that’s for more important than I don’t know trying to figure out how to survive a storm that threatens to kill all life on Earth.

Simultaneously begins the journey of Dr. Hall to his son. Lest we forget that he’s the only guy in the world who has the technology to work out anything remotely to do with what’s happening, tell you what instead of trying to save the world with it, how about you just leave it behind and head off to New York ON FOOT. And of course, lest we forget again, that once he gets to New York, he’s still in the FUCKING EYE OF THE WORST STORM OF ALL TIME.

Oh and don’t forget, the temperature is “decreasing at ten degrees a second”. Ummmm ok, we clearly don’t see the whole of Hall’s journey, but it still takes like half an hour of screen time, EVEN in the impossible chance that he took half an hour to walk to New York, that would mean that the temperature was err, roughly

-18000 Degrees

It’s okay though, because when Dennis Quaid gets tired and needs a rest, the heat generated from a grill in Wendy’s is easily strong enough to stave off those temperatures.

My favourite part of the movie, BY FAR, is the part where we see people going absolutely fucking ape trying to get across the border and into Mexico. This part made laugh inside, so hard it’s un-real. You see, storms are going to ravage the Northern Hemisphere, so the safest place to be is Southern America, or at best, Mexico.

Billions are at the border, tearing the shit down, doing anything just to get across, and it’s just so fucking funny because, you feel like saying:

UH GUYS…YOU’RE AT THE BORDER, I THINK YOU’RE CLOSE ENOUGH!!

It’s not like the storm comes, fucks everything up and then sees the Mexican border and thinks “Hey, Mexico… I think I’ll stop fucking shit up now.”

Although having said that, it’s laughable that people even made it to Mexico in the first place, I mean, the temperatures were so low that the gas in the helicopters all froze and made them crash, so how was it exactly that people’s car were able to run? An let’s not forget that it’s quite a fucking way to Mexico, I doubt that there were gas stations open all down the freeway.

Seriously though, let’s give a few minutes’ attention to the new breed of storm, the new super storm, that manages to cause temperature drops INSTANTLY, and manage to chase you through a building, freezing everything in it’s path, and somehow managing to move UP stairs, despite the temperature drops coming from above in the first place.

Should you find yourself being chased by one of these storms though, you should find solace in the fact that you can save yourself by hiding behind a wooden door, because as we all know, wood is the ultimate defender against minus 1500 degree weather.

Throw into the mix the fact that of the three that went to get the penicillin, Jake Gylenhaal had only a piece of fabric wrapped around his head, and two of them weren’t even wearing gloves, you start to wonder whether or not this movie was stupid on purpose.

But you know what, if you’re movie’s going down, and you don’t know what to do, there’s one thing you can always bank on. A chase. So what did Mr. Emerich do? He went for some mother fucking wolves. And not just ordinary wolves. No, no. Terrible CGI wolves. Wolves that apparently can survive the cold and are also hungry for human flesh. A guy in a fur suit and a rubber mask would have looked more convincing than the wolves in the movie.

HOWEVER.

Having said all that, if the first hour and twenty minutes was bad. That was nothing compared to the heinous, absolutely fucking heinous final fifteen minutes, where The Day After Tomorrow just takes your money, slaps you in the face and shits on your head. I won’t reveal it, because the movie’s pretty new, and the title of “the guy who spoiled The Day After Tomorrow’ is worse than losing your virginity to a razor-back gorilla, but when you see how this movie ends, I believe that you will want to die.

I laughed out loud, and it’s a wonder that I didn’t slap the guy sitting next to me just out of contempt.

Anyway, that’s enough I guess. You should actually watch this movie, it’s pretty damn funny, in an unintentional way.

Peace.

*old article from two years ago.