May 30, 2004
5/30 - "The Day After Tomorrow": Opening Night in Hollywood
On Friday night I saw, "The Day After Tomorrow," which is a brilliant comedy. Not sure it was necessarily intended to be, but every time Dennis Quaid tried to say something dramatic, the audience burst out with howls of laughter. It's not a great movie, nor a mess. Somewhere in between, justifying the current score of 46% on www.rottentomatoes.com. Probably a little better for thinking people
-- if you let your mind constantly project, "some of this really could happen," its fairly interesting.
And there's something eerie about the shots of a wall of ocean water rushing down NYC streets, and thinking that could never happen, but then thinking of the 9/11 footage of an identical wall/cloud of debris rushing down those same streets. A disaster movie like this one definitely feels different post-9/11 -- its a lot easier to envision NYC devastated. So in that regard, the movie is a bit unsettling. But still, the acting and dialogue are soooo bad. It pretty much
undercuts whatever serious message they had intended. And there's a few too many scenes of Quaid telling the President, "this wouldn't be happening if you had listened to the scientists earlier." A great way to make people hate preachy scientists.
The true highlight of the movie (at least here in L.A.) is when they decide to evacuate all of the southern U.S. to Mexico, and then the Mexican's close THEIR border to "illegal immigrants." All the Latinos in the theater were screaming and cheering! (no better place to see a disaster movie than opening night in Hollywood).
Overall, its a fairly stoopid movie, but a good thing for global warming just in terms of giving the public some (albeit temporally exaggerated) images of what climate change will bring. And yes, the climate changes in the movie are virtually instantaneous, but let's not all be gradualists -- as Stephen Jay Gould spent a lifetime pointing out, change often happens episodically, with stable periods punctuated by short bursts of rapid change. Volcanoes do explode, Glaciers do calve, and anoxic events in the ocean do sometimes take place on very short time scales.
So is this movie a good piece of environmental propaganda? Who knows, but I can tell you its a lot better than what I listened to yesterday afternoon, which was a friend telling me about a television show in which "the bad guys" were a group of environmentalists in the form of "eco-terrorists," in which the Navy was sent in to protect the public from these environmentalists. Given the choice between these two portrayals of environmentalists, clearly the cast of "The Day After
Tomorrow" is preferable.
Here's a pretty good assessment of the science in the "The Day After Tomorrow". (and by the way, could everyone please quit using the term, "teachable moment" -- it sounds like the sort of thing people do at a cocktail party that ruins all the fun -- keep the teaching in the
classroom).
The Statue of Liberty goes snorkeling in "The Day After Tomorrow"