The Day After Tomorrow: Kyoto, mon amour

The Day After Tomorrow presents a depressing global warming doomsday scenario

By Anthony Allison

There's a brief moment of levity in The Day After Tomorrow, and one moment of wishful, anti-Bush agitprop, that together almost make Roland Emmerich's global warming adventure worth watching.

They almost make it worth trying to suspend disbelief and accept the German disaster-meister's preposterous doomsday scenario: Global warming melts polar ice caps, disrupts ocean currents and brings "supercooled air" down from the troposphere that sparks a new ice age practically overnight. (Emmerich and Jeffrey Nachmanoff's script was "suggested in part" by a 1999 book, The Coming Global Superstorm, co-written by Pahrump's very own purveyor of wacko conspiracy theories, Art Bell.)

They almost make it worth enduring the awful acting (craggy "paleoclimatologist" Dennis Quaid tries to emote as he trudges across the Arctic wastes from Philadelphia to rescue son Jake Gyllenhaal and love interest Emmy Rossum from the New York Public Library), the clichéd characters (Dennis' ex-wife, Dr. Sela Ward, stays in her evacuated, Washington, D.C., pediatric ward to save a sick kid left behind), the excruciating dialogue ("I think we've hit a critical desalinization point," "I'm using my body heat to warm you," "How big is this thing?") and the onslaught of special effects (Twister meets The Perfect Storm meets Ice Age).

But it's not worth shelling out nine bucks for a ticket, because this supposedly escapist adventure proves to be even more depressing than that ongoing, real-life disaster epic, Dick and Dubya's Bogus Baghdad Adventure.

The witty moment comes (spoiler alert) as polar ice spreads at warp speed across the northern hemisphere and U.S. President Perry King orders the southward evacuation of the Southern states. Faced with a massive influx of U.S. refugees, Mexico closes the border, sparking mass illegal immigration by gringos crossing the Rio Grande.

The wishful thinking moment occurs when hissworthy Vice President Kenneth Welsh, having defended the U.S. government's repudiation of the Kyoto Accords, gets his comeuppance. Crestfallen, in ignominious Mexican exile, this distinctly Cheney-like figure publicly eats humble pie, acknowledging the gracious hospitality of his "Third World" hosts and admitting he was wrong about perpetuating America's gas-guzzling, resource-depleting, globe-warming ways.

But the viewer's cynical sneer soon freezes into a pained rictus of recognition that the Bush administration's failure to ratify the December 1997 Kyoto treaty on limiting worldwide emissions of greenhouse gases is ultimately much more alarming than this alarmist movie. Like revisiting The Towering Inferno after 9/11, The Day After Tomorrow hammers home a sobering reminder that real life often provides (literally) blockbusting sequels far more horrible than anything dreamed up by the makers of apocalyptic catastrophe flicks.

The point of disaster epics, of course, is escapism and schadenfreude. You're supposed to put your brain into neutral and revel in the spectacle of on-screen crowds panicking as their world falls apart.

Sure enough, Emmerich and his special effects geeks escalate the disaster-flick arms race by outdoing anything they did in Independence Day and Godzilla: Killer hailstones rain down on Tokyo, tornadoes lay waste to Los Angeles, Scotland is instantly freeze-dried, and Manhattan is first inundated by a tsunami, then turned into a giant ice sculpture, complete with Empire State Building popsicle and roaming pack of ravenous wolves, when the big chill sets in.

In the end, the only sane response is to follow Ian Holm's example. As their hypothermal end draws nigh, he and his colleagues in a remote Scottish weather monitoring facility grab a bottle of Scotch and, apparently having never seen Braveheart, unaccountably toast England and an English soccer team (Manchester United). Cheers, lads. Let's raise a glass to the death of the Kyoto agreement--and civilization as we know it.