The day after tomorrow
Remember, if you will, if you want to, the 1996 blockbuster "Independence Day", starring Will Smith and Bill Pullman as tough guys battling intergalactic space aliens hell-bent on destroying earth for no apparent reason other than the satisfaction of superiority. Now, re-imagine that entertaining, highly implausible film without the Fresh Prince, Bill Pullman, and all of those aliens, but instead with Dennis Quaid as the hero, and snow blizzards as the enemy, and throw in the same level of apocalyptic insanity cut with a big helping of American cheese and you'll get "The Day After Tomorrow", an awesome, ungodly, laughable, and exciting disaster epic that plays with the globe like it's one big etch-a-sketch, with unpredictable weather patterns as the two white knobs. It is a film so huge in its ambitions, and so terribly overwrought in its murky sentimentalism, that anything less than the complete annihilation of the Northern United States, and an impossible subplot of a father searching for an abandoned, hopelessly imperiled son, would be too domesticated; it lives on sweeping strokes of risk and pig-headedness, and dies on its inability to stick it through, not unlike Will Smith and his alien friends, to the end of its long, windswept, frostbitten journey.
Thank You for Your Visit, Have a Nice Day (Wearabl...
Quaid golfing in 2006.
English: Actor Dennis Quaid prepares for a VIP fli...Afterwards, you'll be happy to see the sun again.
"The Day After Tomorrow" is a popcorn flick in every sense of the phrase. It boasts a recognizable cast, a strict formula (fashioned a bit on '70's B-pictures like "The Towering Inferno"), a big budget, state-of-the-art computer effects, a proven director (Roland Emmerich, also of "Independence Day"), and lots and lots of destruction, with little intelligence to level it off. If you were to see one movie this summer, and eschew all other forms of cinematic art, than...