  Day After Tomorrow is a film that wants you to take it seriously. The creators and screenwriters didn’t want to just make a summer roller coaster ride, they wanted to make a roller coaster ride with a socially conscious, thought provoking message, and I can practically see them at the pitch, it’s not just a disaster movie, it’s a warning about global warming . Unfortunately in trying to be two things at once the film fails on both fronts. The cast is full of talented actors but each seems to be squirming from the bad, clichéd lines they’re forced to repeat. At one point when the high school quiz kids have taken refuge in the public library from the pandemonium and flooding in the New York streets the rival says to Jake Gyllenhall, our young hero, “Just tell her how you feel Sam.” I couldn’t tell if the audience in the theater laughed because I was concentrating so hard on keeping myself from throwing up. You’d think if a company were going to put up the hundred plus million dollars it took to create Day After Tomorrow they’d insist such insipid lines would stay off the screen.
Yes the special effects are impressive, especially the Russian tanker floating toward downtown, but good special effects in bad movies are a dime a dozen and lacking the creative visual paunch something like Pirates of the Caribbean delivered. After leaving the theater and gathering my thoughts I took a moment to consider whether I was being too hard on the film, after all it is just a summer movie, but I’m not. This is a summer movie that asked me, with it’s sober tone and jabs at the current administration, to take it seriously.
Perhaps I would have been less disappointed if the film hadn’t had the germ of a good film smothered beneath the mess. The world, or at least the Northern Hemisphere is coming to an end. A scientist, who’s dedicated his life to studying climate and mother nature, is helpless to do anything about it, so instead of meeting his end in the capital with his governmental co-workers he decides he’d rather die trying to reach his son, a teenager holed up in the New York public library discussing life, death and the end of the civilization with a disparate group of people. Now that’s a movie I’d like to see. 
