Making Global Warming Seem As Believable as An Invasion from Mars or An Attack of Flesh-Eating Zombies

Roland Emmerich, dir.  The Day After Tomorrow.  2004.

By June Pulliam and Tony Fonseca

Originally, we were planning to skip this film, as it sounded likely to be one more of those silly disaster flicks that have proliferated with the coming of the new millennium, similar to Independence Day or Twister.  Then we got a message from the good people at moveon.org about how the much touted The Day After Tomorrow dramatized a very serious and real problem, Global Warming. Moveon was asking members to not only see the film, but leaflet other movie goers with informational brochures decrying the perils of this environmental hazard. While neither of us chose to leaflet anyone, moveon's message made us anxious to see a horror film about the dangers of greenhouse gases. Our interest was further peaked by the various reviews of this film on National Public Radio, reviews which discussed the science behind the script. For example, a Fresh Air segment interviewed Columbia University oceanographer Wallace Broecker, who believes that Global Warming could change the climate more suddenly than other scientists believe. Additionally, All Things Considered evaluated the science presented by the film, emphasizing this over the movie's story telling techniques. 

Thus, we went to the theater during the Memorial Day holiday with the belief that we would see something potentially intelligent in the guise of a Hollywood film. But then a marauding band of wolves chased Jake Gyllenhall aboard a frozen ocean liner, one of them barely missing him when leaping at him through a door. Just a few seconds later, "Jack Frost" (in the form of a 150 below freeze that creeps its way through NYC and threatens to freeze dry anything in its path) literally nipped at Gledhill's heels as he ran back into the New York Public Library to safety (and exactly how one makes a fire hot enough to stave off 150 below cold, and why the glass in one room shatter does not shatter with this freeze, is beyond either of us). That's when we realized that this film wasn't in Kansas anymore.

The Day After Tomorrow begins credibly enough. Scientists stationed in Antarctica discover that the ice there is melting when a segment of it cracks suddenly, causing a very expensive piece of machinery to fall into a deep crevasse.  (In reality, something similar has already happened to scientists working in Antarctica. The ice beneath their camp cracked, dividing their station in half, necessitating that the crew be rescued by helicopter.)  The film then flashes forward to a few days later, in a scene where world renowned climatologist Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid) is testifying before an environmental summit about the dangers of Global Warming.  One of the attendees, Kenneth Welsh (who looks like a composite of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld) as Vice President Becker is actively hostile to the goals of the Kyoto Accord, which would require nations to reduce their emissions levels. Becker belligerently claims that the Kyoto Accord would be too expensive for the world's economies to implement.

But from there, The Day After Tomorrow and reality part company, never to meet again. While Jack Hall is addressing the Kyoto Accord delegates, a weather monitoring station in Scotland discovers some dangerous trends: there has been a 13 degree drop in the temperature at five weather buoys along the U.S.'s northeast coast, and satellite imaging reveals several massive storm fronts similar to hurricanes that have formed over land in the upper northern hemisphere. Almost immediately, Los Angeles is hit with nearly a dozen enormous tornados that rip apart entire high rise office buildings, as well as demonstrate that Fox News reporters have the intelligence of possums. Only Fox news reporters (and we know what network they represent by the logos on their mikes and at the bottom of the screen on their footage) are stupid enough to stand in the middle of the street while twisters capable of hurling large motor vehicles spin behind them. In fact, several of Ruppert Murdoch's finest newscasters are rewarded for their journalistic pluck when the tornados ram them with billboards or drop busses on their Porsches, while they're inside.

As scientists debate the significance of this bizarre weather event, Jack Hall's son Sam (Gyllenhall) boards a plane to New York City to compete in an academic decathlon (what we used to call quiz bowls). Little does either know that the east coast, the entire northern hemisphere really, is about to be hit with catastrophic climate shifts within a matter of hours. New York is pelted with torrential rain for days before it is flooded by a tidal wave, caused by the sudden rise of water level in the world's oceans.  Sam and his snotty, sexy, and nerdy friends find themselves stranded in the New York Public Library. 

And then things get worse.  And more ridiculous.

As ships float down the flooded streets of New York, they're eventually frozen in place when a blizzard hits the eastern seaboard.  Meanwhile, Jack Hall meets with the president (who bears an eerie resemblance to Al Gore¹) and his cabinet to discuss who should be evacuated to the southern part of North American that won't soon be underwater.  In an ironic twist, Americans clog the Mexican border to immigrate south, and those turned away cross illegally via the Rio Grande². The last quarter of the film consists of the audience's marveling at the computer generated destruction north of the Mason-Dixon line, with Jack as our tour guide, since he has decided to don snow shoes and walk to New York City to be reunited with Sam (and he manages this is almost no time--what a guy!).

Of course, like any big budget Hollywood project, The Day After Tomorrow does have its finer moments (remember, an infinite number of monkeys, given enough time, can reproduce Shakespeare-- which is by the way, the method we believe was used to write the script for this film).  One of the more interesting scenes comes when Sam, his three fellow academic decathletes, along with a librarian, a bibliophile, and a homeless man, all sheltered in the library's Rare Book Room, attempt to survive by burning books in the massive fireplace.  The bibliophile argues with his fellow castaways about which books can safely be burned and which merit saving in the face of the fall of western civilization.  In a fine comic moment, all agree that the multivolume tax code can be tossed into the flames with impunity.

But a few laughs, some great CGI effects, and fine casting do not make this a good movie.  Worse yet, this film is so dumb as to have the insidious unintended effect of making people discount the reality of Global Warming.  No one watching this film could possibly be sufficiently daft enough to find its representation of science believable. But you may ask, why would the average American citizen, in other words, your reviewers, even care? 

Well, dear readers, this is more than one of our rantings about how a particular work of horror strains credulity.  It is far more serious than that. The Day After Tomorrow's Chicken Little "the sky is falling" representation of Global Warming ultimately does harm to environmental causes in that it makes this problem seem more like a crackpot theory than anything deserving of serious consideration.  Let's not even discuss how this badly written flick will adversely affect any modification of global consumption patterns. This extreme representation of Global Warming makes it seem to be a phenomenon as likely to destroy the earth as an army of flesh eating zombies or the aliens from outer space in ID-4.  We half expected to see Kang and Konos, the green tentacled aliens from The Simpsons, chortling over the destruction from their vantage point in orbit.

But bad science wasn't The Day After Tomorrow's only shortcoming. It is also marred by the aforementioned poor script writing (sadly, the rule of thumb seems to be that any film that relies heavily on computer generated imagery seems to also limp by with inane dialogue and indifferent acting).  This is not to cast aspersions on the acting abilities of Dennis Quaid, Sela Ward and Jake Gyllenhall. All three have shown in the past that they can create memorable characters, but this script was so weak that there was no opportunity for them to demonstrate these abilities. A quick look at the credits for this film on the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com) reveals that the relatively large cast is significantly smaller than the number of people credited with creating special effects. In this regard, director Roland Emmerich demonstrates that he subscribes to one of Alfred Hitchcock's tenants of filmmaking: that actors were little more than cattle, tools much like the set or the sound, to be used by the director in communicating his vision. This cast too seems to be little more than cattle, to act as best as it might against computer generated backdrops of disaster, which is the film's main character after all.

But finally and most importantly, The Day After Tomorrow fails as a disaster film because it doesn't make the audience realize the imminence of death³. We are old enough to remember the Irwin Allen masterpieces of the 1970s, such as The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and The Towering Inferno (1974). These films often followed a basic formula: a group of strangers is thrown together in the face of a monumental disaster, and they do what they can to survive. In these films, the directors weren't afraid to let main characters do what would more than likely happen in such unlikely circumstances--fight amongst themselves and sometimes die. Even main characters, such as Shelley Winters in The Poseidon Adventure, were allowed to die when logic dictated that survival was not in the cards for them⁴.  This is also the formula of many apocalyptic films such as Night of the Living Dead (1968) and 28 Days Later (2002). While these aren't always examples of great films, at least each allowed for some character development, and some logic in how life and death were meted out. This never happened in The Day After Tomorrow, where characters were all thin representations of well-known cinematic archetypes (such as the earnest scientist, the self-sacrificing doctor, the loyal assistant) and where just about everyone who is a main character manages to survive the "unsurvivable."

Global Warming is a real problem that will cause eventual cataclysmic changes in our climate.  And while we are not scientists, even we know that those changes won't occur in the space of a weekend. Roland Emmerich may have succeeded in creating a lucrative end of the world as we know it film, but these two reviewers do not feel fine about it. In fact, we would like to say to Mr. Emmerich, if he chances to read this review, that we'd like a refund of our ten dollars.

Oh, and we'd like the two hours of our lives spent watching your film back as well.

¹Veteran actor Perry King plays the President, and while he does not look like Gore in most of his photos, he is made up and filmed (especially when in profile) so that he very closely resembles the man who beat Bush by 500,000 votes in 2000.  Our take on this is that at least Emmerich had enough sense than to try to make Global Warming seem like a one-party issue, considering the casting of a Cheney look-alike as the choice for Vice-President.

²In another real stretch of credulity, these fleeing Americans are basically allowed into Mexico, and are not hunted down by locals nor imprisoned or deported, which would happen in reality as no nation's economy could withstand the influx of millions of immigrants at once. This is explained with a quick "The President has forgiven all Latin American debt to cut a deal." We ask, the President of what? Most of the U.S. is under ice or under water. And why isn't Mexico's climate affected at all? These inconsistencies attest not only to poor script writing, but Supersized American egos as well behind the cameras.

³The Day After Tomorrow's glossing over the demise of millions of people puts us in mind of M. Night Shyamalan's Signs. In both movies, the death toll is astounding, yet there is no reflection on the idea of an apocalyptic future because nary a hair on any main character's hair has been tossled out of place. Only incidental characters die, and are as incidentally dismissed. In Signs, we are simply told that millions have been killed, and then we watch a reborn Mel Gibson walk off into the sunset whistling, with no sense of the tragedy that has occurred. At the end of Emmerich's film, an astronaut, viewing Italy, Europe, and North America from space comments that he's never seen the air so clear (a nicely ironic line, but one delivered with way too much sincerity given the situation), completely ignoring the fact that he's looking at millions of dead people, including his own family. In addition to those discussed, better examples of films which represent global or communal annihilation are Mick Jackson's Threads (1976) and Koreyoshi Kurahara and Roger Spottiswoode's Hiroshima (1995), both of which were made for TV. In these films, we see doomed humans roaming the streets; we see death en masse; and we see a few main characters die rather than have everyone important "beat the odds"

⁴One has to wonder if Bambi were remade by a director like Emmerich, whether Bambi's mother would somehow pull through after being shot. In fact, those of us familiar with the short-lived cartoon The Critic probably remember a hilarious scene wherein Jay Sherman is dictating the conditions under which he will return to work in the increasingly ridiculous Hollywood movie business, where dumb remakes are the rule. His final request, after a litany of desires, is "And I want Bambi's mother to die!"
 

More Reading About the Pseudoscience in The Day After Tomorrow

Grossman, Lev. "Hollywood's Global Warming." Science Now (May 24, 2004): 46-49.

Michaels, Patrick J. Day After Tomorrow: A Lot of Hot Air. USA Today (May 25, 2004): 21A.

The Day After Tomorrow: Could It Really Happen? The Pew Center on Global Climate Change.  Accessed 5/31/04.  (http://www.pewclimate.org/dayaftertomorrow.cfm).

Questionable Science Behind The Day After Tomorrow, All Things Considered, May 28th,2004.  National Public Radio (http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=1915138).