The Day After Tomorrow
December 2004 Reviewed by: Anthony Di Marco Format: DVD	(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment Picture Quality Packaged Extras Sound Quality

I have a hard time with a film that tries to weave a social message into a far-fetched, campy plot. Director Roland Emmerich has made sci-fi adventure films about giant lizards, an alien invasion, and now the dangers of global warming. Independence Day and Godzilla proved that the German-born filmmaker knows how to mount a superficial, yet entertaining summer blockbuster. I enjoyed The Day After Tomorrow for the same reasons I enjoyed his earlier films: they are epic stories drawn against a backdrop of ambitious visual effects. What I don’t appreciate is Emmerich’s hackneyed attempt at political critique. His comments about the United States’ relationship with Mexico and the competence of the President and Vice President are half-hearted attempts at comic relief that do more to hurt his left-wing platform than strengthen it.

Politicking aside, The Day After Tomorrow offers some great "money shots" and moves along briskly enough to make you overlook the various leaps in scientific fact. I was even willing to dismiss the ridiculous, and painfully formulaic, subplot involving a father hiking from Washington D.C. to New York to find his son. The opening flyover of Antarctica is beautifully done, as are the natural disasters that follow. I especially enjoyed the cataclysmic flooding of New York and the flash-freeze effect that takes down a trio of British military helicopters and engulfs the Empire State Building in a clever rehash of the action movie countdown sequence cliché. There was a sense of deja vu with some CGI shots. Master shots of New York City seemed as if they were pulled from Emmerich’s other films. The floodwaters rushing toward the New York City Library could have been replaced by Godzilla’s or ID4’s fireball of destruction.

Solid performances go a long way to suspending disbelief. The cast is a collection of excellent B-list actors and some rising stars. Only Ian Holm is underused. As Scottish climatologist Terry Rapson, the actor best known as Bilbo Baggins does little more than give credibility to the global-warming theory and then freeze to death quietly with two colleagues in the secluded Scottish Climate Research Center.

Image softness and a bit of noise are the only flaws in the presentation. Color saturation and black levels were excellent while the well-mixed 5.1 soundtrack was suitably forceful when it needed to be. And Harald Kloser’s bittersweet score does a nice job at elevating the average script. His main theme conveyed both majesty and foreboding as the virtual camera moved smoothly over Antarctica during the opening credits.

Extras were very good. The DVD-ROM layer of the disc included a very thorough behind-the-scenes "making of" documentary that could be accessed only via computer. Unfortunately I needed to install a "Hot Llama" player to access the DVD-ROM extras on my PC. I would rather have been given a choice to use my own software instead of populating my computer with extra junk that I probably won’t use again.

I enjoyed the more technical feature-length commentary given by the screenwriter, cinematographer, editor and production designer more than the self-absorbed sample offered by director Emmerich and producer Mark Gordon. Gordon seemed more concerned about patting his director on the back than offering any genuine insight into production.

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