The Day After Tomorrow is essentially Independence Day with Mother Nature wreaking havoc rather than an army of angry aliens. The film even builds in the same fashion.

In Roland Emmerich's Irwin Allen-esque disaster-epic style Dennis Quaid plays Jack Hall, a climatologist whom (after amassing a mountain of bone-chilling support data) presents an alarming theory to the world--that the climate is shifting and Earth could be headed for another ice age. Hall has no idea when this might happen. It could be 100 years from now or maybe even 1000. But of course, if it took that long, we'd have to cut it into more volumes than Kill Bill. Thankfully for the audience, and much to Hall's horror, the phenomenon occurs much sooner. So within the first hour of The Day After Tomorrow, we are witness to massive tornadoes playing hell with Los Angeles and a colossal tidal wave crashing through the skyscrapers of New York City.

And no disaster picture would be complete without a group of mostly one-dimensional stock characters whose imperiled circumstances we follow as the movie progresses. The most prominent portion of the plot features Quaid's Hall on a mission to reconnect with his young son Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal), who's recently relocated to New York ostensibly to attend school, but mostly to pursue a girl who doesn't even know he is looking for her.

I've never been a huge fan of Roland Emmerich. Stargate was decent enough, but once they actually traveled through the doorway, I became bored by it. Independence Day is a film that I admit to getting caught up in when I first saw it, but now I recognize it for the overrated, dull, and dated film that it is. The Patriot represented a new direction for the flashy director, and while I would call it his best work, I could only think of how much better Braveheart was while I watched it. And don't get me started on that travesty that is Godzilla. If you consider the money they wasted on that leaping lizard of a laugher, it's easily one of the worst movies of the last ten years.

In all fairness, The Day After Tomorrow isn't nearly as bad as I thought it would be. All the light, comic relief that sort of drained Independence Day of anything remotely resembling edginess, is nowhere to be found here. This movie is dark around the edges, and yes, people do die.

The dialogue is weak. It isn't as blatantly silly as it is in Stephen Sommers' recent Van Helsing. It's just more stilted and not in the least bit intellectually stimulating. I really hate it when characters shout out lines in situations where they're obviously not necessary. I mean really--if we're seeing a huge ice wall collapse before our eyes, do we have to listen to a character shout; "The ice is breaking!" The Day After Tomorrow abounds with hysterical proclamations of this sort.

Emmerich also can't resist throwing in a political agenda. Naturally, members of the White House staff don't want to listen to Quaid when he presents his theory, but he's the first one they call when the shitstorm hits the fan. And there is no doubt that Emmerich and his screenwriting crew are drawing from current events when it comes to the presentation of politics here. None of this really bothered me, because it was innocuous and predictable

The performances here aren't really worth going into, because The Day After Tomorrow is about spectacle. It's more about a situation rather than the people in it, and the actors seem to be well aware of this. Quaid is so aware of it, that he just coasts through the proceedings. Whenever he recites one of his profound scientific lines, he doesn't even try to sell it. He just sort of speaks the dialogue and that's it. Ian Holm has a couple of nice moments as a climate expert, as does the underrated Adrien Lester (so good in Michael Nichols' Primary Colors) who plays Holm's right hand man.

I had an opportunity to see Emmerich and some of his crew speak at ShoWest, and the director suggested that it was important to have a dramatic core in the film so that we the audience actually care about these characters. Well, I did feel sorry for the human race in this movie, but I never felt any sort of emotional connection to any specific character. It was all superficial and stuff we've seen a million time before. The most offensive and ridiculous of all the individual side-dramas involves Quaid's wife/doctor  Lucy  trying to evacuate a young cancer victim out of the hospital before the pending destruction. If that isn't blatantly fishing for sympathy, I don't know what is. But then, I suppose that this is all part of the disaster movie genre. And for what it's worth, I was more engrossed here than I was by the emotionless Deep Impact. But for what it's worth, I was more engrossed here than I was by the emotionless Deep Impact.

For those of you going in for the spectacle, chances are you won't be disappointed. Even though most of the effects shots are exposed in the coming attraction trailer, it is quite exciting to see this stuff on the big screen, particularly in a theater with great sound. The tornado sequence is very similar to the one that wreaked such havoc in Twister only bigger, while the waves crashing through New York reminded me a bit of the climax of James' Cameron's director's cut of The Abyss. Although I must confess, that I found myself annoyed by the idiocy of the stupid civilians just standing around waiting to die, particularly in the tornado sequence. Evidently the cue-cards that said RUN!!! got blown away.

As I stated, most of the destruction hits at the one hour mark. After that, The Day After Tomorrow settles into boredom until picking up a little bit in the last ten minutes.

I guess for a big summer movie, The Day After Tomorrow wasn't horrible. The most recent comparison I could make is The Core, although that picture was far sillier, and it was well aware of it. I suppose there is a certain scary message to be found in this movie but it's sort of offset by the self conscious grandstanding of it all. Still, if you're looking for big, flashy excitement and special effects galore, you could do much worse than The Day After Tomorrow. As for me, I'm still awaiting that perfect summer film.