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The Day After Tomorrow Movie Review

The Day After Tomorrow is a 2004 science fiction disaster film directed by Roland Emmerich and starring Dennis Quaid and Jake Gyllenhaal. It is a ridiculous, but fun disaster flick.

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“Have you ever seen the air so clear?“

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When a sudden worldwide storm begins to plunge the entire planet into a new ice age, paleoclimatologist Jack Hall undertakes a dangerous trek to New York City to save his son from the disaster. This is a film that I vividly remember seeing and loving as a kid, but watching it now as an adult, I find it to be absolutely preposterous in every regard, though its entertaining factor is still quite strong.

The world in this movie basically goes toward a full blown ice age in a matter of days, which obviously made it absolutely ludicrous. While we cannot really expect from a Hollywood blockbuster to be scientifically accurate, we can at least wish to see some sort of believability and a story being rooted in reality, which simply wasn’t the case here. The whole thing about the ocean erupting into a worldwide flood was particularly foolish.

But those sequences where water flooded the city were extremely entertaining to watch. The film overall is fun throughout, but particularly so in its first half that was epic and glorious in VFX especially. These special effects were very much ahead of their time as the movie looks spectacular even today. It was shamelessly snubbed by the Academy in that category.

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But my main issue with The Day After Tomorrow isn’t the plot’s ludicrous nature, but the whole second half as this is where the movie forgot about its epic elements and it went fully into dramatic territory featuring characters for whom nobody cares as they are slightly developed and quite bad. Seeing Quaid and Gyllenhaal in an Emmerich movie was crazy to me, in particular witnessing Jake here as he is so above this type of flick, but this was at the beginnings of his career, so it might have been a good choice for his career. Regardless, the human drama torpedoed this movie super hard.

The Day After Tomorrow represents Roland Emmerich at his most ludicrous. The plot is so scientifically inaccurate that it becomes laughable very quickly, but it surely is quite entertaining in its epic first half driven by incredibly advanced VFX for its time. The movie still looks great and it’s still fun to watch, but that human drama in the second half torpedoed the entire story as it was badly written and unnecessary.

My Rating – 2.5