20140315: SciFi Review--The Day after Tomorrow

The Day after Tomorrow

1. Fundamentals, reception.
1. American live action feature length film, 2004, rated PG13, 124 minutes, drama, action, scifi.
2. IMDB: 6.4/10.0 from 245,196 audience ratings.  Estimated budget, 125 million USD.
3. Rotten Tomatoes: 45% on the meter; 50% liked it from 32,747,992 audience ratings.
4. I watched this film on the SyFy channel.
5. Written and directed by: Roland Emmerich.
6. Starring: Dennis Quaid as Jack Hall, Jake Gyllenhaal as Sam Hall, Sela Ward as Dr. Lucy Hall, Emmy Rossum as Laura Chapman, Dash Mihok as Jason Evans, Jay O. Sanders as Frank Harris, Austin Nichols as J. D., Ian Holm as Terry Rapson.
7. Production costs: 125 million USD; revenue, over 544 million USD.


2. Setup and Plot
1. Paleoclimatologist Jack witnesses some impressive breakups of polar ice.  He discusses this during a conference.  He gets a lot of scoffing, even when he predicts changes to the Atlantic currents that will likely bring on an ice age in 100 or 1000 years.


2. Terry Rapson starts noticing some huge current anomalies.  He convinces Jack to plug the current data into Jack's models for paleo-environments.  Jack demurs at first; his model is not meant for making predictions.  Jack adapts his work and fills in the data.


3. While Jack is adapting and applying, odd weather shows up all over North America and Europe.  In parallel themes, Sam takes a trip to New York for an academic contest, and Lucy is involved with a needy patient at her hospital.


4. By the time Jack has a compelling case made with current data, he is asked to present to the President.  He includes evacuating most of the southern United States.  Sam is marooned in New York with some of his friends from the contest.


5. After delivering his predictions and seeing some come true almost immediately, Jack treks to New York to find Sam.


6. Will Jack find Sam?  Will they get to long term safety, if there is such a thing?  Will Lucy and her patient get rescued?


3. Conclusions
1. The last time I checked, commercial TV allows about 18 minutes of commercials for 60 minutes of runtime on a property.  I do not think that number got smaller.  This one ran 150 minutes, so there were at least 45 minutes of commercials, so 105 of content.  This means that 124 - 105 = 19 minutes of content were cut from the original theatrical version.  Crap.
2. One line summary: Dealing with an outlandishly sudden Ice Age in 2004.
3. Three stars of five.


4. Scores
1. Cinematography: 8/10 Nice looking film for the most part.


2. Sound: 8/10 No real problems.


3. Acting: 8/10 Dennis Quaid, Jake Gyllenhaal, Sela Ward, Ian Holm, and Jay O. Sanders were all fine.  The other players were reasonably good.


4. Screenplay: 5/10  A little too heavy-handed on the preachiness, but the adventure part was rather good.  The rescue part seemed incredibly unlikely, but had a lot of heart.  Then again, I saw an edited version.  Also, how does one evacuate half the USA?


5. SFX: 5/10 Reasonable for 2004.  Some of the scaling was off, such as the levels of ice and snow in NYC after some of the storms.  The effects of the tidal wave coming into NYC seemed awfully weak.