By Tanya Batson-Savage, Staff Reporter
A scene from the apocalypse movie, 'The Day After Tomorrow'. - Contributed
THERE ARE two major types of apocalypse movies. There are those that deal with the world after an apocalypse, such as Water World and Mad Max and those that deal with an apocalypse while it's happening. Most movies that take on the disaster while it is happening, usually do so with preventable disasters, which can be averted at the last minute, such as in Independence Day or Armageddon.
As such, The Day After Tomorrow is a disaster flick of a much rarer kind. This time, there is nothing that can be done about the disaster. It cannot be prevented or averted, it must simply be survived. In The Day After Tomorrow, to be perfectly cliché about it (but without the pop band to make it more palatable), it's the end of the world as we know.
Written and directed by Roland Emmerich, The Day After Tomorrow just barely skirts being a disaster itself. With today's technology, it is getting increasingly easier for blockbuster movies to pay too much attention to the special effects. The Day After Tomorrow falls into this pothole. Although it has a slew of special effects to create tornadoes and floods and the like, it does not sufficiently develop the characters.
As with all such movies, it is important that key characters like the president etcetera be gripping, whether in their fallibility or heroism. Additionally, key characters such as Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid) and Sam Hally (Jake Gyllenhaal) are simply not strong enough. The audience is not given enough to become attached to their triumph, outside of any exhilaration which may have resulted.
Additionally, the movie is plagued by the lack of brilliance of its characters. Therefore, though while trapped in a library, the few survivors decide to burn the books rather than all the wooden furniture, which would have probably burned hotter and longer.
Additionally, most of the persons apparently have no idea that if it is cold out, the best solution is to come in out of the cold and stay warm. No, instead they hare off, without food, into what is fast becoming the wide unknown.
What saves The Day After Tomorrow from being a disaster therefore, is the nature of the disaster. Anyone who has heard the term 'El Nino' or 'global warming' has an idea that the world is teetering close to self-destruction.
So, by playing with the idea of the next ice age being brought on by air pollution, The Day After Tomorrow may well be more interesting for environment buffs, who may spend hours disputing the plausibility and possibilities of the film.
However, even for the layman, the idea of the natural disasters can be terrifying. This flick can make one look askance at the next major shower and be quite worried about any freak storms. For us in the Third World, however, the movie gets really interesting near the end. The destruction that will be wrought by the climate shift also brings a massive shift in international power structures. That makes The Day After Tomorrow far more interesting.
Even so, The End of the World is not much of an addition to end of the world movies. It is enjoyable while it lasts, but it is not particularly memorable.
