The Day After Tomorrow

Roland Emmerich’s 2004 film shows a climate system collapsing over a few days, and its source is not a novel but a 1999 book, The Coming Global Superstorm by Art Bell and Whitley Strieber. The compression that scientists attacked is in fact the film’s clock. A process that would take decades is squeezed into hours, which is the only reason a front of cold air can outrun a walking man and turn the father’s journey into a countdown. Remove the error and the suspense mechanism goes with it. The second structural fact is that the 124 minutes split into two different films: the large scale destruction is spent in the first half, and what remains narrows to a few people walking through snow and a group burning books in a library. Dennis Hartmann of the University of Washington said that deriving an ice age from global warming turns the evidence upside down, while his colleague Richard Gammon granted the science was almost all wrong yet valued the film as a hook. Photography took place largely in Montreal and Toronto. Worth it if you can let the catastrophe finish early and accept a second hour built on three people in snow. Avoid it if you sat down expecting the close to match the scale of the wave and the hail.