UrbanWire

Director Roland Emmerich is literally a walking disaster. For someone whose resume includes Independence Day (alien invasion) and Godzilla (ugly lizard invasion), 1 might unknowingly perceive his latest film, The Day After Tomorrow, as yet another disaster-on-humanity film where screaming humans flee for their lives and fight against all odds to survive. Well, it's more than that.

The Day After Tomorrow may be ostensibly pretty and gorgeous with its stunning visuals but it's a façade meant for the visual-happy fans. It's in fact a subtle political commentary that highlights George W. Bush's questionable environmental policies and America's infamous unilateralism.

From the start, we see climatologist Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid) witnessing a huge crack about the size of Singapore at the Antarctic Ice Shelf and presenting his findings at a rather bogus-looking UN conference. He warns the delegation, including the US Vice-President (Kenneth Welsh), that global warming will trigger a climate shift and result in the return of the Ice Age.

The warning falls on deaf ears and it reminds of Bush's rejection of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol (a greenhouse gas reduction treaty) in 2001. It's a jibe at Bush's unilateral stance to isolate America from the rest of the world and place its economy concerns above the more pressing environmental issues.

Soon, we see extreme weather events happening globally from hail falling incessantly in Tokyo, hurricanes blowing in Hawaii, tornadoes dancing through the streets of Los Angeles (while choking up Hollywood Hills) and horror of horrors, snow falling in India!

Professor Terry Rapson (Ian Holm, last seen as Bilbo Baggins in The Lord of the Rings) phones Jack to inform him that the currents in the North Atlantic are disturbed due to the melting of the polar caps and the impending global super storm will bring Mother Earth into the new Ice Age.

And the scene we've been eagerly anticipating after watching the trailers for the past few months unfolds in a penultimate climax lasting about 20 minutes. The rain falls in New York for days and all of a sudden, the ocean waves impel into Manhattan and flood the streets. Cars overturn and off-guard New Yorkers drown in the waters. The Statue of Liberty collapses (much like the American-French ties) and even a Russian tanker sails into Manhattan.

While New York becomes an underwater world, we see Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal) and his friends keeping refuge in the upper levels of the New York public library. He phones his dad, Jack, and is warned to stay indoors as temperatures will decrease drastically.

Jack decides to travel to New York to rescue his son while his wife, Dr Lucy Hall (Sela Ward of Once & Again fame), stays behind in a hospital to look after a patient. The super storm will devastate the Northern Hemisphere and the Americans are quickly evacuating southwards, crossing the Mexican border illegally in a strange twist of irony (11.3 million illegal aliens detained by INS since 1994) and this is another political commentary Emmerich is hinting at.

Meanwhile, in what some consider the chilling climax (no pun intended) of the film, the plummeting temperatures freeze New York all over, every tall skyscraper now a block of ice so to speak. It marks the end of all the action, the curtain call of a stunning visual show.

What happens thereafter is the emotional struggle of mankind in this furious action piece. We see the love between father and son – Jack traversing across miles of snow and ice to rescue Sam and the unacquainted love between Lucy and her patient kid. There's also the blossoming love between Sam and his friend, Laura (Emmy Rossum). In a scene, he fights wolves in the tanker in order to fetch medicine for Laura's injury.

It's time to forgive Emmerich for the debacle in Godzilla because the German director-producer-scriptwriter of the movie scores for a brilliant casting. The super storm is the star of the movie hence A-list actors (or stars if you ask me) are conspicuously missing. Instead, we see Dennis Quaid (Frequency, Traffic, Far From Heaven) of obscure movie fame portraying the nuances of a father who loves his son and a professor who desperately wants to save the planet, which is his other love. Jake Gyllenhaal, an indie movie actor (Donnie Darko, The Good Girl, Moonlight Mile), puts on a neat performance as a teenager struggling with his hormones and learning to be a leader.

This isn't just some pompous or grandiloquent disaster flick. Although CGI is first class and Academy Award quality here, the emotional heartstrings and political persuasions in the movie are significantly essential as the nuances of the film. The Day After Tomorrow is very much relevant today and will be tomorrow or 10 years from now where greenhouse gases are hopefully reduced and Bush isn't president anymore.