The Day After Tomorrow 2004 Trailer
Vickiana Sconyers
As my colleague Robin Valentine pointed out yesterday, the CG trailer debuted at the Xbox show had serious hero shooter vibes, with a "hello fellow kids" kind of banter that I don't associate with the dry, dark humor of Thedas.
I was worried too, and spent the evening consoling myself with thoughts of the Sacred Ashes trailer for Dragon Age: Origins and the Dragon Age 2 Destiny trailer, both of which looked very different from the actual games. The Veilguard's trailer did say "game engine footage," though I'm not certain how much stock to place in that.
Now look, this thing is a somewhat compressed video posted to X in a maximum of 720p so I can't tell if the whole world looks just as shellac-ed as Scout Harding's face did in that reveal. We don't see either Varric or our protagonist Rook's faces here either, but this seems like something I might be happy to call a Dragon Age game.
It's dark. It's moody. And if it's not as grimy and gritty as we're used to, well, we already knew that the cultural hub of Minrathous was going to be way more advanced than the backwaters of Ferelden where the series began.
We'll see the remainder of this scene tomorrow, I'm sure, but for now we can hear Varric and Rook deciding to chase down one of the game's companions Neve Gallus to help track Solas, the presumptive villain of Veilguard who lost his name rights when the Dreadwolf title got replaced.
It is funny to me that this first peek shows us walking around on a quest with Varric. From the companion reveals yesterday, we assumed that he wouldn't be a full party member again. That's likely still true, but neither has he been relegated to hub areas like the advisors of Dragon Age: Inquisition. He's still got to get out and about. Please let that man put his feet up for once, damn.
I don't think this gameplay peek entirely assuages the fears I share with PC Gamer mag editor Rob Jones who worried that Dragon Age has lost its identity based on the cartoony physical gags of the reveal trailer. But it's a nod in the right direction, at least.
The rest of the gameplay reveal is scheduled for tomorrow, June 11 at 8 am Pacific / 11 am Eastern. I'll reserve my full judgment until then, but I'm feeling a little less leery than I was this weekend.
Lauren started writing for PC Gamer as a freelancer in 2017 while chasing the Dark Souls fashion police and accepted her role as Associate Editor in 2021, now serving as the self-appointed chief cozy games enjoyer. She originally started her career in game development and is still fascinated by how games tick in the modding and speedrunning scenes. She likes long books, longer RPGs, has strong feelings about farmlife sims, and can't stop playing co-op crafting games."}), " -0-10/js/authorBio.js"); } else console.error('%c FTE ','background: #9306F9; color: #ffffff','no lazy slice hydration function available'); Lauren MortonSocial Links NavigationAssociate EditorLauren started writing for PC Gamer as a freelancer in 2017 while chasing the Dark Souls fashion police and accepted her role as Associate Editor in 2021, now serving as the self-appointed chief cozy games enjoyer. She originally started her career in game development and is still fascinated by how games tick in the modding and speedrunning scenes. She likes long books, longer RPGs, has strong feelings about farmlife sims, and can't stop playing co-op crafting games.
According to BioWare, Dragon Age: The Veilguard is the first entry in the series where 'the combat's actually fun' and where characters are 'intentionally' the focus of the storytelling, which seems pretty unfair on the first three games
Ghostbusters: Afterlife saved the franchise. After Sony refused to listen to what the fans wanted in 2016 and gave us malignant pile of slop that was Ghostbusters: Answer The Call, the studio recognized the error of their ways and made a wise decision to right the course.
The ad is uninspired. The only thing that made me even remotely interested in it was the Ghostbusters logo. There is no grit, there is very little humor and inexplicably; the trailer is completely devoid of actual ghosts. The ad leads the viewer to believe that the antagonist in this movie is fear itself.
The other aspect of the trailer that I find bothersome is that it was more reminiscent of environmental disaster movies than it was about Ghostbusters. I saw New York City getting frozen over and my mind went to The Day After Tomorrow. Nobody wants to be reminded about The Day After Tomorrow. That really ruined my day.
The title choice for the movie feels forced and unnecessary. This is a title that the execs at Disney would come up with after a week long brain storming session. It is unoriginal, uninspired and seems to be more merchandise oriented than usual.
This is further impacted by the somber titling of Ghostbusters: Afterlife. Transitioning from Afterlife to Frozen Empire is clunky. A more agreeable title may have been: Ghostbusters: Beyond The Realm or something similar to that.
Is Sam Neill trying to make a comeback through indie action movies? That or he just needed to earn some extra money. Yep, it's The Day After Tomorrow all over again. Quiet Earth found a trailer for a movie called ICE that literally has the exact same plot as The Day After Tomorrow - a guy gets separated from his loved ones, crazy new ice age ravages the world, covering the UK in hundreds of feet of snow. And then it becomes an action movie. I can't quite decide if this looks better or worse than The Day After Tomorrow, but maybe I'll give it a shot because it's British and has a good cast: Stephen Moyer, Richard Roxburgh, Claire Forlani.
Environmentalist Thom Archer warns of a new ice age and points a finger at sinister energy giant Halo, who is drilling on the Greenland Glacier and causing it to melt. But his warnings are all ignored. So Thom realizes he must fight for his survival and the survival of Earth on his own. Based on James Follett's novel.
ICE is directed by British filmmaker Nick Copus, who's making his feature debut after working in TV for a while. The screenplay was written by fellow TV veteran Ray Harding. This was produced by Powercorp, the same company behind Crusoe and the UK's Day of the Triffids, and was shot entirely in New Zealand. We're not sure when to expect this, since it seems like an indie or straight-to-DVD release, but we'll let you know.
Roland Emmerich, as even his critics would concede, has a flair for destruction. Independence Day, and to a lesser extent his whole canon, from Stargate through to The Patriot, is an expert exposition of the slow build/big bang theory of devastation. Emmerich can be relied upon to prolong the inevitable cataclysm, steadily cranking up the tension as dead-meat mortals struggle to understand forces that the audience already knows will consume them - the "money shot", after all, is always in the trailer.
The problem with ID4, and to a greater extent Godzilla, is that when the storm finally passes and the fight-back begins, Emmerich appears to lose interest, as if the German only really came to America to tear down the White House. The second half of those movies, which should theoretically contain all the surprise, issue none. With The Day After Tomorrow, DAT if you will, Emmerich does not exactly correct this imbalance (the movie clearly climaxes with the New York tidal wave familiar from the trailers), but he does find a genre which provides an even better showcase for destruction and sustains his interest until the bittersweet end: the disaster movie.
DAT cleaves much closer in structure and spirit to The Poseidon Adventure (Emmerich's personal favourite disaster movie) than to ID4. It is, in effect, The Poseidon Planet, and once disaster strikes with an incalculable cost to off-screen human life, the raggedy bunch of comically mixed survivors must simply hold out long enough for the rescue helicopters to arrive.
DAT may willingly, and often knowingly, reheat the hoariest chestnuts of the disaster genre, but mercifully survival-by-clich never threatens to occasion the kind of flag-waving, grandstanding jingoism that so spoiled ID4. Indeed, divorced from American producing partner Dean Devlin, Emmerich finally reveals his true colours here jabbing the red, white and blue until it bleeds bright green.
Disaster movies have always been an implicitly political genre. They flourish, as they did during the early 1970s, during times of economic uncertainty, and serve to expose hubristic mankind's misplaced faith in technology - and, by extension, capitalism itself. In that sense, DAT, a project that the writer-producer-director developed himself away from studio interference, is as much a personal picture as a cookie cutter blockbuster, and the green European could not have chosen a better time to land a blow against American arrogance.
Of course, just because the director takes his politics seriously - the Kyoto Accord is name-checked in the first five minutes - doesn't mean that we have to, and the level of political debate on display in Emmerich's phoney UN conference is hardly more convincing than the shonky scientific explanations cribbed from that famous authority, alien abductee Whitley Strieber. Luckily, Emmerich has always cast actors rather than stars, and here he is well served by his B-list leading men. Character moments still represent thin ice for the director, but with Quaid spreading grit and gravitas and Gyllenhaal gamely skating the comic margins of the material, the movie just about keeps its footing as it slides inexorably towards the holy devastation we all came to see.
Three truly unmissable sequences - the tornados tearing through LA, the drowning of New York and the final superfreeze - set the benchmark for the summer of special effects and create a template for the onslaught of CG-driven disaster movies that will doubtless follow. The CGI may not always be entirely photo-realistic, but these sequences have sweep and power and, in places, an almost eerie beauty. And it is here that the director finds himself on surer ground, finding space amid the mayhem for the deft touches and cruel wit so often lacking from the dialogue scenes. Everybody is good at one thing, they say; for Emmerich, it's destruction.
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