The Day After Tomorrow
Revisiting the master of disaster’s climate change catastrophe 20 years on
Yes, it’s still blighted by schmaltzy sentimentality and ridiculous science, but there’s a chilling prescience about some of its weather events.
Having obliterated the White House, stomped all over New York (and a beloved movie monster’s 40-year legacy) and mangled 18th century American history, German film director Roland Emmerich decided it was time to up the stakes.
Inspired by Art Bell and Whitley Streiber’s 1999 book The Coming Global Superstorm, he and co-writer Jeffrey Nachmanoff (then best known for penning the screenplay for Behind Enemy Lines, a film that tried to make Owen Wilson an action star) wanted to deliver a clarion-call regarding climate change to the masses, via with medium of Hollywood blockbuster.
But while 2004’s The Day After Tomorrow (currently available to stream on Disney+) saw the “Master of Disaster” most definitely deliver a spectacle, its science was dismissed as “enjoyable nonsense” by anyone with a relevant BSc or above.
It’s biggest crime? It essentially over-eggs the pudding, coming up with a ridiculous scenario that posits a cold “snap” that’s more Thanos than any kind of believable alteration in global thermodynamics.
Sure it made for a compelling trailer (iced-over Statue of Liberty and all) and striking visuals, but a more measured approach (that didn’t involve borrowing elements of 1996’s Twister and the climatic equivalent of Batman and Robin’s Mr Freeze’s weaponry) would undoubtedly have delivered a more resonant tale than this flick o’ fantasy (one that’s made all the more galling by its bizarre once-and-done “storm of the myrioi” – once-in-10,000 years – approach to the potentially existential catastrophe, especially having repeatedly told us earlier it was all looking like it would trigger the next ice age).
However, credit Emmerich with not only creating the (then) highest-grossing Canadian-made movie, but also the first carbon-neutral major Hollywood production – thanks to him dipping into his own pocket to the tune of US$200,000 – and one that dared to call out the Bush/ Cheney administration’s opposition to the Kyoto Protocol for reducing greenhouse gas emissions by deliberately casting actors (especially the Cheney-esque Kenneth Welsh) who resembled the then US president and vice-president to play the finance-before-science blinkered politicos.
And while adhering to the traditional disaster-that-reunites-a-broken-family/ relationship dynamic that dominated everything from Independence Day and Twister to Outbreak and The Abyss in the decade prior (and later Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, The Rock’s
San Andreas and Emmerich’s own 2012), he also created a field-tripping-teens-inperil template that arguably inspired Jon Watts’ first two Tom Holland-starring MCU Spider-Man stories.
Twenty years on, though, with the world’s climate clearly more unpredictable, larger and larger chunks of the polar ice caps breaking off or melting away and the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation collapse (a key driver of the events in The Day After Tomorrow) increasingly predicted as a nightmarish reality sooner rather than later, has the film gained a extra sheen of authenticity or prescience?
The answer is yes – and no. While still haven’t seen snow in Delhi or helicopters dropping out of the sky due to cold air over Scotland, you can tick off Emmerich’s predictions of giant hailstones in Japan, typhoons troubling Australia (although technically they’ve been tropical cyclones) and a tornado cutting a swathe through Los Angeles (even if it didn’t take out the Hollywood sign). And there genuinely is “an iceberg the size of Rhode Island” now “freely floating north of Antarctica”. That does make certain, once fantastical, claims now more than a little unnerving.
But the chances of seeing the Big Apple almost instantly freezing over in 2024 are still more likely to be at a cinema near you (shout-out to Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire for a Gotham makeover eerily similar to Emmerich’s) than on the evening news.
Having said that, New York’s Grand Central Station did flood this past winter, the United Kingdom just months ago faced a week-long “deep freeze” and 15-feet of snow did indeed bury certain parts of Eastern Europe in 2012.
There’s also some interesting, non-climate-related meditations and observations that also have extra frisson given American events of the past two decades. There’s a debate over burning books (and what titles should and shouldn’t be incinerated), a what-seemsnow darkly hilarious scenario of American citizens illegally crossing the border into Mexico to escape the inhospitable elements of their homeland and an Oval Office commander-in-chief expressing that he now has “a profound sense of humility about consuming the planet’s natural resources without consequence”.
The Day After Tomorrow will be viewed by many as a period piece from a time when Jake Gyllenhaal could wear a scarf without ridicule, Emmy Rossum (Mystic River, The Phantom of the Opera, Poseidon) was Hollywood’s It Girl and Dennis Quaid (On A Wing and A Prayer) wasn’t just a faith-based movie star.
But if you can get past the schmaltzy sentimentality, dull domestic dramas (it’s no surprise both a sick child and cute dog become imperiled) and Emmerich’s American flag-waving, this now feels a bit more significant than the “shambles of dud writing” that left The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane “determined to double my consumption of fossil fuels”.
The Day After Tomorrow is now available to stream on Disney+.