The Day After Tomorrow (Roland Emmerich, 2004)
One of the principles I try to hold to when reviewing films is to avoid simply savaging a film. The smugness of smart-arsed critics who can do nothing but pick apart a movie always irritates me. Which isn’t to say that bad movies shouldn’t be criticised. It’s just that the best reviews of bad films are those that also stop to note the good points amongst the bad. Likewise, most classic films have their share of flaws, and defining why these films succeed despite their problems is often difficult. Critics need to appreciate the elusiveness of the strange alchemy that makes a good film. As they say, nobody sets out to make a bad movie.
Nobody, that is, except Roland Emmerich.
In Independence Day, Godzilla, and now The Day After Tomorrow, Emmerich has managed to make at least three outright turkeys. (I managed to miss his other efforts, which include Stargate and The Patriot). What is disturbing about these films is their consistency: Emmerich is too consistent an achiever to write these off as misfires. These are terrible movies: derivative, full of cardboard characters, and often dull. Yet they are so precisely made, and so similar, that you know Emmerich isn’t missing his target. Instead, he’s deliberately shot three arrows right into the bullseye of mediocrity. You can see why Hollywood executives love this guy. Just give him a hundred million dollars or so, and he’ll give you a lowest common denominator disaster movie that you can open simultaneously around the world and make a tidy profit with before the word of mouth gets out. When the problems of a film seem to arise from aiming low, it becomes hard to accentuate the positive.
The Day After Tomorrow is an old fashioned film, and not just because of the debt it owes to 1950s science fiction and 1970s disaster epics. This is a film that reeks of the mid-to-late 1990s, when the new computer generated effects were driving a revival of the disaster genre. Emmerich’s really big hit, Independence Day, was released in 1996, on the leading edge of this movement: other notable examples were Twister, Titanic, Deep Impact, Armageddon, Volcano, Dante’s Peak, and – in a more satirical vein – Mars Attacks. By the time Emmerich’s most derided film, Godzilla, was released in 1998, the genre’s revival was already running out of steam. In retrospect, the release of The Matrix in 1999 seemed to draw something of a line under this movement by showing digital effects used for something more imaginative than large scale carnage. (As has often been noted, the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 seemed almost choreographed to resemble one of these movies, and no doubt reinforced their absence from our screens: who had an appetite for them when real life calamity was so fresh in the collective consciousness?)
So The Day After Tomorrow’s willingness to forestall any attempt at originality, characterisation, or humour, and trust instead in the magic of digital disaster footage seems almost retro. There is also an air of desperation about the subject matter: with the 90s films having exhausted the most inherently cinematic natural phenomena (volcanos, tornados, tidal waves, meteorites), Emmerich is left to try and make an exciting movie about climate change. The most enjoyable aspect of The Day After Tomorrow is the unintentional humour that arises from Emmerich’s attempts to pull off this rather improbable feat. We start with an ice shelf breaking apart, and of course our hero is right at the edge when it happens and has to jump across to save himself. By the film’s conclusion we are being presented with temperature drops so extreme they chase people down corridors.
All this would be forgivable if it were done with any flair. I am the last person to thoughtlessly deride genre filmmakers. I thrive on genre films. My favorite film is Jaws, and the Bond and Star Wars series are central to my love of cinema. Genre films give filmmakers a clear framework to work with, but what they demand in return is invention and reinvigoration. (It’s much easier to spot a hack piece of genre filmmaking than a hack arthouse film, because the genre filmmaker is working in such a transparent system – we know exactly what their aims are). Emmerich doesn’t bring the zest to his genre reinterpretation that the founders of modern blockbuster cinema (George Lucas and Steven Spielberg) did. Instead, his films feel like reheated leftovers. The big showcase sequence in this film is a tidal wave crashing through New York, but it is almost indistinguishable from an equivalent scene in Mimi Leder’s Deep Impact. Worse, it reproduces a number of moments from Emmerich’s own Independence Day almost shot for shot, with the wall of fire from that film replaced here with a wall of water.
The film’s structure, too, is right out of Independence Day, utilising the same pattern of hopping between multiple characters playing out different roles in diverse locations. Emmerich takes us all around the world, but never manages to give much sense of how the problem is unfolding in a global sense, or even any of the local colour that might adorn a genuine epic. (The major non-US characters we see are some British scientists, who spend much of the film in a hut, and then die off-screen). This globetrotting jingoism is all the more bizarre given that Emmerich grew up in Germany: there isn’t any of the sense of a different perspective on the US that characterises the work of many other foreign-born directors who work in Hollywood. One might think the US-centrism was a put-on, but the film is so earnest and witless that it shakes off such suspicions. There isn’t even the sense of humour that acted as a small mercy in Independence Day, and to a lesser extent in Godzilla.
Emmerich has internalised the grammar of the modern action film, including its short attention span, and shoots his movie in a cliched action style. No characters really matter, which may be why his films always focus on the destruction of landmarks: the audience can identify with them more than the characters being wiped out. The dialogue is clunky and unceasingly expository. The usual conflicts (such as that between the hero with the data that might save the world, and the hostile Vice President who doesn’t want to listen) play out in a particularly hackneyed, familiar manner. Emmerich only seems to know how people such as scientists or politicians behave from what he has seen in other movies. When he gets to the big environmental message of the film, its delivered in a deadpan, direct to camera address by the US President. (It reminded me of Criswell’s opening monologue in Plan 9 From Outer Space).
So if I am going to rather self-consciously play by my own rules and single out some positives, what would I identify? Well, aside from one truly striking effects shot (a sustained shot of a tidal wave overwhelming the Statue of Liberty, which works because Emmerich for once has the patience to hold on a remarkable and original image), it’s the environmental message. It is positive to see a film explicitly urging America to sign the Kyoto protocol, and Emmerich deserves credit for some serious intentions. I’ve read interviews with Emmerich where he talks of the struggle to include his message about Kyoto in the film, but the strength of his message is undermined by the daft way he delivers it. The early scenes of climate change – where real news footage is used to show the first incidences of wild weather – are effective because they reflect our everyday experience. The message is clear: this is happening now. Unfortunately, once Emmerich starts showing ludicrously overblown climate change (where helicopters fall out of the sky because their fuel snap-freezes), it becomes impossible to accept this as anything other than a fantasy scenario, and the environmental message gets lost. We don’t believe the situation Emmerich is showing us, so why should we believe the message he’s selling us?