quote:President George W. Bush has cancelled all his appointments and fund raising trips for the next week after viewing a White House screening of the film ‘The Day After Tomorrow’. The President, apparently believing the film was actually a Homeland Security Brief, immediately had most of his entire staff moved to a secret location in the Rocky Mountains to save himself from the impending tidal waves. He also sent Senators Tom Daschle and Ted Kennedy as well as House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi an all expense paid vacation to Virginia Beach.
Clad in scuba gear, a parka and carrying an umbrella and snow shoes, the President was seen boarding Air Force One dragging his wife Laura kicking and screaming aboard, while panicked White House Staff ran around the plane waving their arms wildly and crying.
Unnamed White House Source Wegman (Pudgy) Waterhouse, speaking one the condition of anonymity, said, “ Look, I know it’s just a movie and Kerry’s more of a destructive force to us than any tidal wave, but I’m still pissed off. Do you know that prick wouldn’t let me on the plane with him? I figured I’d go along and get a free trip to Aspen for the weekend, but as I was going up the stairs to board the plane he kicked me in the face and knocked me down the steps screaming, ‘There’s not enough food for all of us! We need the space for women to help repopulate the planet. You can’t go!’ Man, that hurt. After all I’ve done for him.”
Also Left Behind were Secretary of State Colin Powell, CIA Director George Tenet and Treasurer Secretary John Snow.
The Spoof is a great site for those of us (well, me, anyway) who don't get enough satire from The Onion.
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Has anyone seen Day After Tomorrow? Not being a fan of disaster movies by any stretch, I probably won't...unconvinced about the factual-ness of global warming, I probably won't, either.
But I heard NPR's review of the film, and it was hiliarious in its indictments of it. Truly, a film made by the maker of Independance Day.
Posts: 17164 | Registered: Jun 2001
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I saw it last night and found it entertaining. Some of the effects are really impressive, and even if it is a little overdone, it DOES make you think - a little bit. *SPOILER* I got a kick out of the American base in Mexico. I wonder how peaceful it would really be, all those northern world leaders with their forces operational and nothing to lose.
Posts: 16 | Registered: May 2004
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I definitely intend to see it, but I will approach it with pretty much the same attitude I went into The Core with. I know ahead of time to suspend my sense of reality and focus on the effects and presentation. Extremely low expectations turned The Core into a rather enjoyable movie for me. I'm hoping for the same from The Day After Tomorrow.
Posts: 1090 | Registered: Oct 2003
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I've typed enough reviews of this movie for one day...
quote:It was mildly amusing when they destroyed the Hollywood sign. I'd expect nothing else from the director of Independence Day. Then they made a big deal out of killing Capitol Records too. Then the billboard to kill the anchorman. Subtlety is apparently not this guy's forte.
I couldn't help but laugh out loud when he announced he was going to walk 100 miles in 2 days. Carrying all the necessities of life among 3 (2) people. In snowshoes. You'd be lucky to make 6 miles a day in those conditions.
So many of the plot points were obviously written in reverse. Thus, watching the movie in forward motion, the appearance of the animal trainers has no purpose at all. Ditto the appearance of the boat. But wait! It actually sets up a ridiculous CGI wolf-chase sequence in the middle of a preachy movie!
And yet, for my $4 matinee price, this picky critic was satisfied. Lots of great eye candy in LA, NY, and Emmy Rossum (thanks IMDB, never heard of her). She reminds me of Natalie Portman, but EVEN HOTTER. Really.
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"I couldn't help but laugh out loud when he announced he was going to walk 100 miles in 2 days. Carrying all the necessities of life among 3 (2) people. In snowshoes. You'd be lucky to make 6 miles a day in those conditions."
Hm. Who is "you"? If you is a well rested+fed very very desperate, in shape man on reasonbly not fluffy or sopping wet snow, pulling a sled that was inteligently packed without a huge amount of food, you could concievably average as much as two and half miles and hour and keep it up for about a maximum of 20 hours a day, in which case you could reach your end point 44 to 48 hours after you started, 100 miles away. And I haven't watched the movie but now I want to see it more than ever.
Posts: 1103 | Registered: Apr 2002
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I have absolutely no interest in this film. None. Perhaps it's because I'm just environmentalist enough to be offended by environmentalists who are pointing to a film in which people are apparently FLASH-FROZEN as an example of why we ought to be careful.
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It's been awhile since I've been backpacking, but despite being in good shape at the time I recall a 15+ mile day to be a very tiring one. Granted this was in the mountains, but there was also no snow.
The hero is a moderately geeky scientist whose team, at least when the camera is on, has trouble moving 10yd without getting tired. Lots of the time he is carrying his partner as well as his gear.
[ May 30, 2004, 01:54 PM: Message edited by: Richard Berg ]
Posts: 1839 | Registered: May 1999
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Tom, I'm fairly certain the flash-freezing is in there because of the mammoths that have been found quick-frozen in some places. I doubt whether it is the correct explanation, but there is something to explain, and at least Strieber is trying to.
Posts: 1114 | Registered: Mar 2004
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It's obvious the real inspiration for this movie was the incomparable Immanuel Velikovsky. He laid it all out in Earth in Upheaval, published in 1956.
quote:Earth in Upheaval Earth in Upheaval presents documentation of global catastrophes in prehistorical and historical times: the evidence of stone and bone. This evidence from the natural sciences indicates that these great disturbances which rocked our world were caused by forces outside the Earth itself.
In Earth in Upheaval, Velikovsky brings together a multitude of facts, such as palms found in northern Greenland, corals in Alaska, the unfossilized bones of hippopotamuses in England, and the remains of polar bears and arctic foxes crushed together in one mass with ostriches and crocodiles.
Further data verifies that at the very time that Dr Velikovsky claimed as the date of the recent global catastrophe only 3500 years ago, the level of the world's oceans dropped sharply, climate was violently altered, and ancient civilizations were plunged into destruction.
Dr Velikovsky's first book, Worlds in Collision, offered evidence of tremendous cataclysms during historic times, and created a furore of controversy unknown since Darwin's debate ninety years earlier.
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After seeing the movie last Friday when it opened, my reaction is it is one of the best disaster flicks yet made. Maybe the message is slightly "green," and "Kyoto" was mentioned once near the beginning. But the main message that most people would come away with is simply that we may have been too reckless in the way we use the world's natural resources, and we could pay for it. That is a pretty generalized and vague criticism. If this were a Michael Moore style propaganda docurama, then it would have done a whole lot more to get across a message. As propaganda, the movie is poor. As thought-provoking entertainment, it is great.
The movie did not to me clearly indict any one political party or push any one political agenda. Maybe The vice president looks a little like Dick Cheney, but the president looks a little like Al Gore. The vice president in the movie was simply the standard stuffed-shirt bureaucrat who ridicules and snubs the heroic scientist at first. Every disaster movie has this role.
As for the science involved, it was actually not that far-fetched. Call it "punctuated equillibrium" with a vengeance. Without, I hope, giving away any spoilers, let me cite the chain of events given to explain the disaster: A large chunk of the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica breaks off, "the size of Rhode Island." (This did actually occur about three years ago--I saw the satellite pictures.) This in turn pushes the salinity-desalinity balance (there are layers of differing salinity in the ocean) over the edge, which in turn causes a drastic shift in the North Atlantic current (which is in fact responsible for the fact that the northern temperate zone is temperate and not sub-arctic). This then creates a great thermal imbalance in the northern hemisphere, which generates enormous, super hurricane-like storms. These storms are so powerful, that in their eyes, super-cold air (minus 150 degress F) from the troposphere is brought down to the surface, instantly freezing everything and everyone, like the wooley mammoths that were found in Siberia, flash frozen with green, undigested vegetation still in their stomaches. They did not make that up about the mammoths, but nobody knows for sure how to account for it.
I am surprised the writers and producers went to such lengths to explain the science involved and make it sound credible, with historical examples. I am always pleased when writers and producers try to go to some length to make their science fiction sound at least half way plausible.
Whether all these things could happen within a week is debatable, of course. And manifestly, having that chunk of the Ross Ice Shelf the size of Rhode Island break off three years ago did not have the effect portrayed in the movie. And you would think the ice would have to melt first before it could affect salinity layers in the ocean. It is also questionable that a change in the North Atlantic current would produce cataclysmic climate change in only a few days. And if somehow a cyclonic storm could actually be so powerful that it pulled down supercold air from the upper troposphere, then everyone in the eye would die from suffocation in the partial vacuum that would be produced, regardless of whether they could keep themselves warm.
The main reason climatologists or any other scientists "laugh" at the science in the movie is that they do not think cataclysmic climate changes could take place quickly, because of their brainwashed indoctriination in uniformitarianism and gradualism. Even when confronted with clear, inescapable evidence of sudden cataclysm, they insist it was just some local event, and they try to expand the timeline as much as possible.
Just one example: Most geophysicists are wedded like a religious belief to the idea that it takes thousands of years for the earth's magnetic field to reverse. But over a decade ago, scientists Prévot and Coe (and colleagues) reported in three papers the evidence they had found of extremely rapid changes of the Earth’s magnetic field recorded in lava flows at Steens Mountain in southern Oregon. Scientists regard Steens Mountain as the best record of a magnetic reversal because the volcano spewed out 56 separate flows during that episode, each of these rock layers providing time-lapse snapshots of the reversal. Within one particular flow, Prévot and Coe discovered that rock toward the top showed a different magnetic orientation than did rock lower down. They interpreted this to mean that the field shifted about 3° a day during the few days it took the single layer to cool. Such a rate of change is about 500 times faster than that seen in direct measurements of the field today.
Not only that, later Coe and Prévot reported that the rate at which the orientation of the ancient magnetic field rotated reached an astounding 6° per day over an 8-day period, and have argued that these field changes recorded in these lava flows at Steens Mountain do reflect changes in the Earth’s main magnetic field. They have refuted every argument and criticism that has been made of their measurements and findings.
References for the above:
Prévot, M., Mankinen, E. A., Grommé, C. S. and Coe, R.S., 1985. How the geomagnetic field vector reverses polarity. Nature, 316:230–234.
Coe, R. S., Prévot, M. and Camps, P., 1995. New evidence for extraordinarily rapid change of the geomagnetic field during a reversal. Nature, 374:687–692.
But the majority do not want to believe this. It contradicts their paradigm, and so they choose to go on telling everyone that the idea that everything happens gradually over thousands or millions of years is "fact" and is not seriously questioned. It is seriously questioned, and is contradicted by concrete, convincing, evidence like that of Coe and Prévot.
Perhaps some people are comforted by the foolish notion that it takes thousands or millions of years for anything cataclysmic to happen. Scientists who propagate this myth ill-serve the public. Manifestly, in human historical experience, all cataclysms have been sudden. We ought not to allow ourselves to be lulled into a false sense of security, supposing that we will have centuries to come up with a plan to head off a slowly developing catastrophe such as a major climate change. Global catastrophe can overtake us suddenly in a multitude of ways, and we need to be more serious about learning what can happen and what proactive measures are needed now.
[ May 31, 2004, 04:35 PM: Message edited by: Ron Lambert ]
Posts: 3742 | Registered: Dec 2001
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I didn't criticize its stature as a disaster movie. The effects are the best I've ever seen, and the science didn't have me rolling on the floor laughing. Its problems lay in adding elements for the sake of Hollywoodism instead of good drama (or even good propaganda). One word: wolves.
Posts: 1839 | Registered: May 1999
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quote:This is one of those movies where the characters are every bit as dumb as the director.
Manhattan is suddenly submerged beneath fifty feet of water, right? (This just suddenly happens for no particular reason.) And a bunch of people hide in an upstairs floor of the New York Public Library. Then 20 minutes later the ocean freezes solid and a blizzard dumps a foot of snow on it. Okay, I’m thinking. That’s total crap. I’m no climatologist, but I did live in the Midwest for a few years and I know how long it takes moving water to freeze – and we’re not talking 20 minutes.
So then everyone in the library gets a bright idea. Hey! We can walk out of here now that the ocean is frozen. The hotshot kid of a bad-ass climatologist says “Wait!” (This is only an approximate quote.) “We’ll freeze to death if we go out there.”
A bespectacled man looks at the kid and asks, “Where did you get that information?”
And I’m thinking, dude. The ocean just froze solid in 20 minutes. It’s freakin’ cold outside.
The whole movie is like that.
I haven't decided if I'm gonna see it or not yet. I may. It sounds fun.
Posts: 1323 | Registered: Aug 2001
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It actually is a lot of fun. I laughed a lot at the stupid characters and the stupid plot devices, but all in all it was a very enjoyable movie.
Posts: 739 | Registered: Dec 2003
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Probably because Roland Emmerich directed both movies, Day After Tommorrow had the same effect on me as Independance Day did. It was one of the best times I had at the movies this year, but in the back of my mind, I know that there's no way I'm watching it again.
However, due to its great special effects, I suppose we'll be seeing the movie nominated for a Visual Effects Oscar next year.
Posts: 121 | Registered: Mar 2004
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I really liked it. I prefer not to review the movies I go to and try more to watch them.
I mean, I wouldn't write a review of Transformers: The Movie and say it was a great piece of film, but I enjoy it every time I see it.
And yeah, the wolves did seem kind of corny. But as corny as it sounds, their involvment was one of those things that "if everything worked out perfectly, that might actually be possible, if not probable." Just my opinion, anyway.
Posts: 3852 | Registered: Feb 2002
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I thought the "attempt" to link the disaster with global pollution/resource plundering was not only feeble, but pretty stupid in this movie, to begin with. After all, the main character spends the first half of the movie trying to warn of the disaster he knows is going to happen. Why does he know??? because it happened 10,000 years ago.
Well, if it happened 10k years ago, I'm pretty sure it wasn't because of rampant industrial pollution or plundering of resources. So why would we be to blame for it happening again?
But in general I liked the movie. The spfx were superb. The acting was believable even if the script was not. I felt like I got my matinee ticket price worth of entertainment.
Anyway, where else are you gonna see people frantically trying to outrun a flash freeze? (Sorta the old outrun-the-explosion cliche in reverse.) Posts: 6394 | Registered: Dec 1999
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I liked the scene where they were arguing over whether to include books by Nizsche with the library books they were going to throw in the fireplace to burn for heat, when a guy down on the next level said, "Hey, there's a whole section on Income Tax Law down here we can burn!" Which goes to show there is a silver lining in every dark cloud.
Posts: 3742 | Registered: Dec 2001
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quote: The three storm chasers with Wichita ties were hired by Twentieth Century Fox in 2002 to take a film crew into a hurricane to capture footage that could be used for the movie.
They walked out more than two hours later marveling at the special effects, but not sure whether anything they shot over 16 days in September 2002 actually made it onto the screen
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Just saw it, Karl. It was certainly fun to watch.
It may or may not help with suspending your disbelief...The fellow behind the movie, Whitley Streiber, is also the author of the nonfiction(?) The Coming Global Superstorm. In that book Streiber explains the scenario seen in the movie; he also strongly implies that there was a previous civilization 10000 years ago. Take it as you will; Streiber is in a long tradition of such claims about previous civilizations. Myself, I think they'd have left some sign, no?
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but now I want to see it more than ever.
