It's Just a Movie

Much ado has been made about 2004’s first big-scale “blockbuster” film, The Day After Tomorrow. The movie has all the usual hallmarks of a summer popcorn flick – standard cookie-cutter characters, cheesy dialogue, some good solid destruction, and a ton of money spent on special effects. In short, it’s supposed to be a nicely diverting time-waster.

Directed by Roland Emmerich, who made Independence Day as well as Godzilla (you win some, you lose some), the film is about a new Ice Age triggered in only a week or so by global warming. The result is typical summer-movie death and disaster, with the trailers showing some very exciting-looking shots of twisters demolishing downtown Los Angeles and a tsunami drowning New York. (Of course, trailers are notorious for showing only the best parts of the movie, but that’s beside the point.)

Some environmental groups have glommed onto the film, pronouncing it to be a sort of wake-up call to the dangers of global warming. (It’s not like that hasn’t been done before. Look at Kevin Costner’s Waterworld. Actually, don’t look at it; it’s not very good.) Al Gore, the Ben & Jerry guys, and others have gone on record saying that the premise is rooted in accurate (if highly exaggerated) science and that basically everything in the movie is George W. Bush’s fault.

On the other side, detractors claim the film is little more than pseudo-science tree-hugging propaganda, and have compared it to the 1983 TV film The Day After, in which the Americans and Soviets annihilate each other in a nuclear war. They also point out that the film is “inspired” by a book written by alien-abduction claimant Whitley Streiber and conspiracy-theory radio host Art Bell, insinuating that a movie based on anything from these guys can’t possibly be taken seriously.

For their part, executives at 20th Century Fox are reportedly thrilled about the free publicity they’re getting from all this commotion.

But far from being some heavy-handed political polemic, it appears that The Day After Tomorrow is really just a summer disaster movie. No more, no less. (After all, sometimes a cigar really is just a cigar.) It’s a throwback to the sensational disaster flicks of the 1970s just as Independence Day was a throwback to the alien-invasion movies of the 1950s and 1960s. Like TV shows which breathlessly describe their plots as “ripped from today’s headlines” to bring in audiences, the screenwriters used global warming for the film’s hot topic (ha!).

The reviews are starting to come in, and like movies in general, some are good, some are bad, and some are average. But many say that people who get into screaming matches over the film’s supposed message are missing the point; that it’s just a big, splashy spectacle of a summer movie. So don’t make such a big deal about it, and if this kind of flick is your cup of tea, enjoy.