review

The Day After Tomorrow
written and directed by Roland Emmerich
starring Dennis Quaid, Jake Gyllenhaal, Emmy Rossum, Dash Mihok, Jay O. Sanders, Sela Ward, et al


Does anybody care to take "The After Tomorrow" as a serious environmentalist statement? Yeah, yeah --- some anti-environmentalists probably do, as a symbol of "fuzzy science," Chicken Little-style alarmism, Hollywood subversive propaganda, hackneyed clichés and all that. On the other side of the ideological divide, anyone who takes it as a serious warning is a fool.

But just like I enjoyed "The Tailor of Panama" as a funny spoof about a rogue spy without taking it as an attempted representation of Panamanian, American or British realities, I liked this environmental disaster flick.

Is it a case of strange perversion? Just like every time I get a chance to see "It Came from Beneath the Sea," --- you know, the one that starts out with the dumping of barrels of radioactive waste into the Pacific, and proceeds to a giant squid attacking San Francisco --- I mostly giggled my way through all the horrible tragedies. A freighter washed down a Manhattan street by a tidal wave, then frozen into place by an instant Ice Age? Cool --- but maybe not an all-time classic like the scene in the other flick where the squid stuck his tentacle into a cable car and then pulled it out with screaming victims attached to the suction cups.

"The Day After Tomorrow" has some beautiful photography and impressive special effects, and a number of well-acted subplots. If you take it all tongue-in-cheek, and put this movie in the same genre as "Them" and the Godzilla flicks, then it's very entertaining. That is, if you have tastes in common with this reviewer, who will try very hard not to miss any opportunity to see "Destroy All Monsters" again.







Also in this section:
Cool Internet sites
Japanese-Panamanian Friendship Concert
Film: The Day After Tomorrow

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