saw the day after tomorrow today. interesting film.
a bit preachy, but the effects were on the spectacular side, as promised. global-scale storms are difficult to visualize, and even harder to communicate to film via CG, but the filmmakers managed it.
what they failed to do, however, is create believable wolves. yes, they can create a storm surge so tall the statue of liberty looks like she’s wading in the harbor up to her neck, and tornadoes that demolish los angeles in an afternoon, and an incredibly believable snowed-in manhattan skyline. that, i think is where the hubris set in.
hey, they said, we don’t need finicky real wolves. they need to be fed, after all. we can simulate them.
you go to such effect-driven films to suspend your disbelief for a while, sure, but when they take the care to use real chunks of ice (i suppose, or else the 20-second throwaway hailstorm scene was the best effects in the movie) why not use real wolves for the two minutes where three of the main characters were finally in believable peril?
and, at just over two hours long, parts of the day after tomorrow dragged into next week, while it could have used an additional hour just to tie up loose ends. or just finish the ending. as it stands, the movie is a very long beginning, some middle, and the credits.
in every disaster movie, in the end there must come some kind of salvation – where the leads are all saved from the forces of nature by some extraordinary means. or else the moving-forward, rising-from-the-ashes message of hope. in the end of this movie, there is the humble “my fellow americans” moment. however, the dire peril of the previous 120 minutes simply evaporates. poof. deus ex screenwriter. sorry, we can’t make this movie into the epic it really wants to be; we’ve run out of time.
either that, or the world was saved when, suddenly, the animator suffered a fatal heart attack.