Film Reviews - The Day After Tomorrow
I rather like apocalyptic films.
Take "28 Days Later" - it's a great film, the end of the world
(or so we believe) and zombies too. It must be a terrible place
to live in.
Then there were the meteor disaster movies, if one of those
babies hit the Earth it would be the end of civilization as we
knew it, the end of the human race.
Going back further we had "Independence Day" where the world was
attacked by aliens, we welcomed these visitors from another
world only to see them destroy each and every capitol city
around the world and then prepare to wipe us all out.
So you can probably imagine how excited I was by another
disaster film from the people behind Independence Day, this time
an "End of the World" fest bought about due to massive climate
changes.
What made this scenario scarier was the fact that it "could
happen" although not at the speed and rate that it happened in
the film of course, but it is something scientists have been
predicting for years.
The film starts off well enough, we have the scientists telling
the government and others about the possibility of global
warming and how it would mean another Ice Age for the planet
(yes, global warming would produce an Ice Age - you'll have to
watch the film for an explanation).
Of course the whole idea is rubbished by the government and most
other people at the lecture.
Soon strange things start happening around the world - 14oC
temperature increases in the oceans, massive hailstorms that
smash cars and people to pieces.
Soon these strange weather phenomenon's are spreading further,
soon New York is being battered by 10 tornadoes at the same
time, a massive tidal wave is set to engulf parts of America.
This is where my first gripe of the film begins - there wasn't
enough disaster and it only seemed to be happening to the US.
Sure the scenes were very impressive, seeing New York torn to
pieces by tornadoes was very well filmed, seeing The Statue of
Liberty up to it's neck in water was also extremely well filmed.
Finally seeing a large tanker floating down a water logged city
- down what was a street full of cars only moments before gave
an air of realism to the whole series of events.
However what about Europe? We didn't see any of the European
cities being battered by freak weather conditions. We didn't see
people in other countries wondering what was going on - it was
all about America and how they were going to survive.
The problem was that suddenly the film didn't feel apocalyptic -
it felt like America was going to be destroyed but the rest of
us would sleep soundly in our beds and only know that something
was going on when we happened to switch on the television the
next day.
I think a few of the Radio Reports mentioned London but that is
about as far as you got.
I also felt that the film went off at a tangent once it got to
the halfway point and no longer was it a film about disasters
and about the need to "work together" towards a common goal.
Instead it turns into one man's journey across many miles of
frozen America to rescue his son from a now frozen city.
Don't get me wrong, all very interesting, all very noble, the
problem is I was here to see the end of civilization as we knew
it, to possibly see half of mankind wiped out, I really wasn't
bothered if one man managed to save his son or not.
But then again I was interested, at no point did the film make
me feel for all of the millions of other people that the new Ice
Age would kill. We saw a few dead bodies, we saw a group of
people leave the relative safety of a library and get killed,
but there was no sense of the enormousness of the disaster at
hand.
So I was forced to be interested in this new part of the film
even though I wanted to be worried about all of the other people
on the Earth.
In "Independence Day" we saw major cities and landmarks
destroyed - we believed something bad had happened to a lot of
people, I didn't feel that as much in this film.
This film is worth going to see if only for the special effects,
the scene where the massive tidal wave smashes into New York,
nearly covering the Statue of Liberty is very impressively done
and the one moment where you do feel what is going on.
However you do need to be prepared for the story of one man's
journey to get to his own son to take centre stage and away from
the perils of the Earth's inhabitants - unfortunately that isn't
exactly what I wanted to see.
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