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The Day After Tomorrow Our rating: Your rating: 1 2 3 4 Your Comments: see all MPAA rating: PG-13 (for intense situations of peril) Theater release: May 28, 2004 by 20th Century Fox VHS release: October 12, 2004 Directed by: Roland Emmerich Runtime: 2 hours 4 minutes Cast: Dennis Quaid (Jack Hall), Jake Gyllenhaal (Sam Hall), Emily Rossum (Laura Chapman), Dash Mihok (Jason Evans), Kenneth Welsh (Vice President Becker), Ian Holm (Terry Rapson), Jay O. Sanders (Frank Harris) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

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For a German expatriate, Roland Emmerich sure has a knack for making politically charged—and very cheesy—movies that coincide with American election campaigns. In 1996, as alleged draft dodger Bill Clinton ran for a second term against war veteran Bob Dole, Emmerich released Independence Day, in which aliens blow up the White House and the instinctively peace-minded President hops aboard a fighter plane to kick some serious butt. In 2000, when Al Gore and George W. Bush vied for the soul of the nation, Emmerich put out The Patriot, a B-grade revenge movie masquerading as a Revolutionary War epic. And now, as Bush defends his presidency against charges of short-sighted unilateralism, here comes The Day After Tomorrow—yet another disaster movie, but this time one that emphasizes international cooperation, rather than American triumphalism.

Dennis Quaid as Jack Hall

The film also has something to do with the environment, of course. The story, written by Emmerich and Jeffrey Nachmanoff, concerns a sudden, instant ice age that sweeps over the Northern Hemisphere as a result of global warming, and this freezing of the planet is preceded by hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and sundry other catastrophes. The one man who sees it coming, though not quite so soon, is workaholic climatologist Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid), who theorizes the Ice Age of 10,000 years ago began very abruptly, and therefore the planet could be in for another flash freeze in the near future. But of course, the government will not heed his warnings. Vice President Becker (Kenneth Welsh) is especially skeptical, and says new environmental measures would be bad for the economy.

But never mind. The debate is cut short when the world's weather turns apocalyptic—snow falls in New Delhi, giant hailstones crush pedestrians and traffic in Asia, multiple tornadoes destroy downtown Los Angeles, helicopters freeze in mid-air over the British isles, and a rising ocean floods Manhattan, coming up to the Statue of Liberty's waist and sending tankers drifting between half-submerged skyscrapers. Among the many victims stranded by these storms is Hall's son Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal), who is in New York with a couple of high school classmates for an academic competition; fittingly, they hide with other New Yorkers inside the public library. There, they cope with wounds, a lack of food, flashes of cold temperature so sudden and extreme the frost seems to chase them down the halls, and even a pack of wolves that have escaped from the city zoo.

Jake Gyllenhaal is a bit wet behind the ears

However successfully these survivors may flee the special effects, they cannot dodge the lame writing or direction. Hall, who has been so busy with work his whole life he has never had all that much time for his son, braves the cold and heads north to find Sam. His credentials as a movie hero are established in his very first scene, when he leaps across a fresh new rift in an Antarctic ice shelf to retrieve his team's ice core samples. The film builds up to this moment with a breathtaking aerial shot, no doubt digitally enhanced, that suggests a spectacular sense of scale; Hall's base seems even smaller than you expect, against the incredibly vast frozen landscape. But after the crack in the ice shelf appears, and after Hall rescues his samples, and after the camera pulls back up for one last aerial shot, you cannot help but be struck by how ridiculously coincidental it is that this one fault line, which runs for miles, should happen to pass right through the middle of Hall's base.

The triteness of that scene surfaces in other moments where Emmerich tries to juxtapose the earth-shattering events of his film with its smaller, more personal dramatic moments. In one scene, Hall tells a colleague he hopes the nations of the earth will learn from their mistakes, to which he then adds, "I'd sure as hell like a chance to learn from mine." It takes Hall's colleague a moment to realize he is no longer talking politics or science, but has abruptly changed the subject to his own family, and his own track record as a mostly absentee dad. Emmerich might have thought this was a clever segue, but it just comes off as stiff and contrived, instead. The cast, which also includes Ian Holm as a British professor and Jay O. Sanders as Hall's partner in science, is certainly capable of better things, but they are never given much more to do than kill time between the money shots.

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