TheDay After Tomorrow is a 2004 American science fiction disaster film[2] conceived, co-written, co-produced, and directed by Roland Emmerich, based on the 1999 book The Coming Global Superstorm by Art Bell and Whitley Strieber, and starring Dennis Quaid, Jake Gyllenhaal, Sela Ward, Emmy Rossum, and Ian Holm. The film depicts catastrophic climatic effects following the disruption of the North Atlantic Ocean circulation, in which a series of extreme weather events usher in climate change and lead to a new ice age.[3][4]
Originally slated for release in the summer of 2003, it premiered in Mexico City on May 17, 2004, and was released in the US on May 28, 2004. The film was a commercial success, grossing $552 million worldwide against a production budget of $125 million, becoming the sixth-highest-grossing film of 2004. Filmed in Montreal, it was the highest-grossing Hollywood film made in Canada at its time of release. The film received mixed reviews. It was nominated for Best Science Fiction Film and Best Special Effects at the Saturn Awards.
Jack Hall, an American paleoclimatologist, and his colleagues Frank and Jason, drill for ice-core samples in the Larsen Ice Shelf for the NOAA, when the ice shelf splits away. At a UN conference in New Delhi, Jack discusses his research showing that climate change could cause an ice age, but US Vice President Raymond Becker dismisses his concerns. Professor Terry Rapson, an oceanographer of the Hedland Centre in Scotland, befriends Jack over his views of an inevitable climate shift.
In New York City, Jack's son Sam, along with his friends Brian and Laura, participate in an academic decathlon, where they make a new friend, J.D. The North American superstorm creates strong winds and rain that flood Manhattan in knee-deep water. All transportation halts, stranding the city population. A massive storm surge inundates the city, forcing Sam's group to seek shelter at the New York Public Library, but not before Laura, in an attempt to help rescue two French-speaking tourists in distress from a cab with a police officer, cuts her leg between two taxis. Sam is able to contact Jack and his mother Lucy, a pediatrician, through a working payphone. Jack warns Sam of the exacerbating superstorm and urges him to stay inside and warm and promises to rescue him. Rapson and his team succumb to the European storm. Lucy remains in her hospital caring for bedridden patients, where the authorities eventually rescue them.
Upon Jack's suggestion, President Blake orders the southern states to be evacuated into Mexico, while the northern ones are warned by the government to seek shelter and stay warm. Jack, Jason, and Frank make their way to New York. In Pennsylvania, Frank falls through the skylight of a mall covered in snow and sacrifices himself by cutting his rope to prevent his friends from falling in with him.
In the library, most survivors seek to join the southern states' refugees once the floodwater freezes, despite Sam's warnings. In Mexico, Becker learns that Blake's motorcade perished in the superstorm.
Laura develops sepsis from her injury, whereupon Sam, Brian, and J.D. scour an abandoned Russian cargo ship that drifted into the city before the water froze for penicillin and supplies. Although they find them, they also encounter a pack of escaped wolves from the Central Park Zoo. The boys fend off the wolves and make it back to the library with what they need as the eye of the North American superstorm passes over and freezes Manhattan. Jack and Jason take shelter in an abandoned restaurant.
Days later, the superstorms dissipate. After finding people outside frozen to death including those from the library who tried to escape, Jack and Jason reach the library, finding Sam's group alive. Jack sends a radio message to US forces in Mexico.
In his first address as the new president from the US embassy in Mexico, Becker apologizes on The Weather Channel for his ignorance and sends helicopters to rescue survivors including Jack and Sam's group in the northern states. On the International Space Station, astronauts look down in awe at Earth's transformed surface, now with ice sheets extending across much of the Northern Hemisphere, remarking that the air never looked so clear.
The Day After Tomorrow was inspired by Coast to Coast AM talk-radio host Art Bell and Whitley Strieber's book, The Coming Global Superstorm,[5] and Strieber wrote the film's novelization. To choose a studio, writer Michael Wimer created an auction, with a copy of the script being sent to all major studios along with a term sheet. They had a 24-hour window to decide whether to produce the movie with Roland Emmerich directing, and Fox Studios was the only studio to accept the terms.[6]
The Day After Tomorrow was filmed predominantly in Montreal[7] and Toronto,[8] with some footage also shot in New York City[9] and Chiyoda, Tokyo.[10] Filming ran from November 7, 2002, until October 18, 2003.[11]
The Day After Tomorrow features 416 visual effects shots, with nine effects houses, notably Industrial Light & Magic and Digital Domain, and over 1,000 artists, working on the film for over a year.[12]
Although a miniature set was initially considered according to the behind-the-scenes documentary, for the destruction of New York, effects artists instead utilized a 13-block-sized, LIDAR-scanned 3D model of Manhattan,[13] with over 50,000 scanned photographs used for building textures.[14] Due to its overall complexity and a tight schedule, the storm surge scene required as many as three special effects vendors for certain shots, with the digital water created by either Digital Domain or small effects house Tweak Films, depending on the shot.[15] Miniatures were employed for a later underwater scene in which a city bus is crushed under the bulb stern of an abandoned Russian tanker ship that had drifted inland.[16]
Similarly, the opening flyover of Antarctica was also computer-generated, created by digitally scanning miniature iceberg models created out of sculpted styrofoam; the falling pieces of ice as the shelf cracks were entirely hand-animated. Created by the effects company Hydraulx and running for approximately two and a half minutes in length, the scene was at the time the longest continuous all-CG shot in film history, surpassing the space zoom-out from the opening of Contact (1997).[17]
On Rotten Tomatoes, 45% of 219 critics gave the film a positive review, with an average rating of 5.3/10. The website's critics consensus reads: "The Day After Tomorrow is a ludicrous popcorn thriller filled with clunky dialogue, but spectacular visuals save it from being a total disaster."[20] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 47 out of 100 based on 38 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".[21] Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade "B" on an A+ to F scale.[22]
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times described the film as "profoundly silly", but nonetheless said the film was effective and praised the special effects. He gave it three stars out of four.[23] Mark Caro of the Chicago Tribune wrote a completely negative review which considered the film unworthy of publicity for the climate change debate it had created.[24]
Emmerich did not deny that his casting of a weak president and the resemblance of Kenneth Welsh to Vice President Dick Cheney were intended to criticize the climate change policy of the George W. Bush administration.[25] Responding to claims of insensitivity in his inclusion of scenes of a devastated New York City less than three years after the September 11 attacks, Emmerich said that it was necessary to showcase the increased unity of people in the face of disaster because of the attacks.[26][27][28]
Patrick J. Michaels, a former research professor of environmental science at the University of Virginia and fellow at the Cato Institute who rejected the scientific consensus[29] on global warming, called the film "propaganda" in a USA Today editorial: "As a scientist, I bristle when lies dressed up as 'science' are used to influence political discourse."[30] College instructor and retired NASA Office of Inspector General senior special agent Joseph Gutheinz called The Day After Tomorrow "a cheap thrill ride, which many weak-minded people will jump on and stay on for the rest of their lives" in a Space Daily editorial.[31]
Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, an expert on thermohaline circulation and its effect on climate, said after a talk with scriptwriter Jeffrey Nachmanoff at the film's Berlin preview:
Clearly this is a disaster movie and not a scientific documentary, [and] the film makers have taken a lot of artistic license. But the film presents an opportunity to explain that some of the basic background is right: humans are indeed increasingly changing the climate and this is quite a dangerous experiment, including some risk of abrupt and unforeseen changes ... Luckily it is extremely unlikely that we will see major ocean circulation changes in the next couple of decades (I'd be just as surprised as Jack Hall if they did occur); at least most scientists think this will only become a more serious risk towards the end of the century. And the consequences would certainly not be as dramatic as the 'superstorm' depicted in the movie. Nevertheless, a major change in ocean circulation is a risk with serious and partly unpredictable consequences, which we should avoid. And even without events like ocean circulation changes, climate change is serious enough to demand decisive action.[32]
In 2008, Yahoo! Movies listed The Day After Tomorrow as one of its top-10 scientifically inaccurate films.[34] It was criticized for depicting meteorological phenomena as occurring over the course of hours, instead of decades or centuries.[35] A 2015 Washington Post article reported on a paper published in Scientific Reports which indicated that global temperatures could drop relatively rapidly (one degree Fahrenheit change or 0.5 degrees Celsius change over an 11-year period) due to a temporary shutdown of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation caused by global warming.[36]
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