There’s Got To Be A Morning After

The Day After Tomorrow harks back to all the 70s Irwin Allen disaster movies (think The Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure) with one clearly visible advantage—the advances in visual effects technology.

Thus we have the spectacle of a towering wall of water crashing down Manhattan, tornadoes tearing Los Angeles apart, and the coming of a second Ice Age in speeds the attention-deficient MTV-and-Playstation-generation would appreciate (plus the freezing effects were a lot—pardon the pun—cooler than Mr. Freeze’s in Batman Forever.)

They ditched the schmaltzy theme song (the title of this episode refers to Poseidon’s Oscar-nominated ditty.) But what they retained were the individual life stories of Very Important Characters interspersed between the “Ooh!” and “Ah!” spectacular set pieces. Ostensibly they’re there to provide the drama, the human interest that will hopefully connect with the viewers.

Hello.

I plunked down one hundred thirty pesos (I watched in Greenbelt 3, so sue me for being sossy) to see CGI (computer generated images), not to see Ian Holm reduced from playing Bilbo Baggins to Amado Pineda. I wanted to see Manhattan go under water, not Jake Gy-howdoyouspellhislastname-ll underplay. I wanted to see planes and buildings come crashing down instead of heavy-handed dialogue delivered so clumsily you could hear the “clunk!” after the actors say the line (“I made a promise to my son. I’m going to keep it.” [clunk!])

Noticed though how New York is the most abused city in the movies. King Kong made it his romping ground. The Ghostbusters had to save it from an ancient evil that came back in the form of a Stay-Puff Marshmallow Man mascot. The aliens in Independence Day blew up the Empire State building and destroyed the Statue of Liberty. Godzilla tried to do a King Kong but ended up giving birth to mini-Godzillas in a sequence that looked like a deleted scene from Jurassic Park. Why does Hollywood love to pick on New York and trample on it? Is this some sort of an East Coast versus West Coast kind of thing?

To be fair, The Day After Tomorrow showed Hollywood wiped out by tornadoes. After years of seeing New York landmarks being trampled, blown up, or covered in post-apocalyptic rubble, it was nice to see the Hollywood sign torn down by a twister.

And while it was a throwaway joke, it was funny to see the reversal of roles at the US-Mexico border, where thousands of Americans started pouring into Mexico to escape the winter storm.

The Day After Tomorrow is really a typical Hollywood summer blockbuster movie: heavy on special effects, light in character, plot and theme, and totally forgotten the day after tomorrow.