The Null Device

The Day After Tomorrow

I finally got around to going to see that climate-change disaster-porn film that various US "liberals" were acclaiming as a progressive Passion of the Christ. It was much as I expected it to be.

In short, the visuals were spectacular (about half a dozen SFX firms were credited), with magnificent sets and computer graphics sequences. The characterisation and plot was pure Hollywood formula, with a very linear plot and characters having only the simplest of motivations, and, half the time, thinking in schmaltzy Hallmark-card truisms. Mind you, it being from Roland Emmerich (and the sub-Spielbergian sequence from Independence Day of the towheaded little boy and his dog watching Will Smith take off to battle the aliens still sticks in my mind), I wasn't expecting anything above the lowest common denominator in this respect, so I wasn't disappointed. (Some day, I'd like to see a visually spectacular film whose characters are more than focus-grouped, computer-plotted cardboard cutouts, but I digress.) The science, of course, was exaggerated by orders of magnitude to make it more spectacular (running afoul of the laws of physics in places, such as the instant temperature drop), and some of the details were a bit geographically ignorant (such as the scene with the whisky in the Scottish research station; someone there either assumed that Scotland was part of England or that most Americans wouldn't know otherwise; I wonder how well this film will do in, say, Glasgow or somewhere). Then again, none of that was a huge surprise; as I said, it's special-effects porn, and porn films of any variety aren't known for their plotting or characterisation.

There are 7 comments on "The Day After Tomorrow":

Posted by: Alexander http://www.asseptic.org/433 Fri Jun 25 16:07:33 2004

"Special FX porn" - now that's a coined phrase.

Posted by: Graham http://grudnuk.com/ Sat Jun 26 03:14:12 2004

I'd usually heard it expressed as CGI Porn.

Posted by: Emphyrio http://emphyrio.blogs.com Mon Jun 28 03:37:44 2004

What, they were drinking the wrong kind of whiskey? How was it in error?

Posted by: acb http://dev.null.org Mon Jun 28 04:11:30 2004

No, the "to England" thing. Britain (England + Scotland + Wales) is not the same as England. The Scots hate being called "English", and usually support whichever football team is playing against England, it's unlikely that a Scot sitting in a Scottish research station would have made a toast to England. Granted they could all, by coincidence, have been English, but it looked more like somebody didn't do their homework.

Posted by: David Tiley http://dox.media2.org/barista Mon Jun 28 10:06:50 2004

Not to mention the fact that the very comment was shite. Even dodgy directors working on wartime propaganda films with cardboard gun turrets like In Which We Serve, and One of Our Aircraft Is Missing would not have sunk that low..

Posted by: sphinx18 http:// Sun Sep 12 12:10:01 2004

well... wat can i say to this movie... the movie is amazing due to the special effects and the way the sounds are made... but some scenes are so exaggerated... the ending is pretty bad... its the worst ending ever... why i say this??? well, they did not show on how the state recovered from the disaster or whatsoever... they should have showed on what happened to the people after the state was frozen... there should something that happened after that... but eith the movie, nothing happened... it just ended right there with the people survived the very cold tempearature... :D

Posted by: Tory Ben http:// Sun Sep 12 14:41:11 2004

In their defense, I think a high proportion of the scumbag idiot majority aren't able to distinguish between 'England' and the UK. I notice this frequently in internet postings particularly.