Let me talk first about The Day After Tomorrow. And let me begin by recommending that you do NOT watch this movie. If you've seen it, don't watch it again. If you haven't, then avoid it at all costs. Unless, of course, you're really in the mood for an MS32K kind of activity. Then go for it.
I won't go into expansive detail about why Tomorrow is despicably awful--instead, I'll summarize a few key points. The worst flaw, perhaps, is it's didacticism. I can't remember having ever seen a more shamelessly preachy film. It's very much like An Inconvenient Truth, but with a higher budget and better special effects. In the end, the Dick Cheney stand-in apologizes to the decimated world for not taking better care of the planet. And then astronauts look out of their space-station window and remark with awe at how clear the air is.... And imagine, it only took the death of billions of people.
But even if you agree with every minute point this film crams down its audience's throat, you still couldn't get past the atrociously bad science. At every turn, they go for drama over realism. My personal favorite scene has our hero (Jake Gyllenhaal, bless his heart) running from...cold. That's right, there's a wave of super-cooled air from the upper atmosphere that is pouring down to the surface of the earth through the eye of a colossal hurricane-blizzard, and it freezes everything in seconds. It's movement is represented by the frosting over of all the surfaces it passes. The climax is when Jake runs down a hall, cold close on his heels, barely making it through a door in time to close it and block out the terrible monster of cold air, thereby saving himself and everyone else in the room.
Who's to blame for the offensive banality of this stuff? Well, probably many people, but let's just point our collective fingers at Roland Emmerich in an attempt to save ourselves from similarly terrible films in the future. His newest film coming up is going to be 2012. Please, do your poor brain a favor and don't go see that one when it comes out. Not only because it will be bad, but because it looks like it's going to be a remake of Tomorrow. Don't believe me? Watch the preview.
But there's another film that deserves at least relatively higher praise: The Day the Earth Stood Still was originally a classic 50's sci-fi that was really quite good. It was well-written and exciting, and they didn't try to pull off too much, special FX-wise, that they couldn't do. Which meant that the film maintains a certain air of respectability, despite it's being a 50's sci-fi.
I was wary when I heard it was being remade, but the previews looked slick and cool, and so I had hopes. But then everyone, everyone told me it was terrible. Here's a direct quote from a film professor I respect:
WARNING: TDTESS is often cringingly, appallingly bad when it's not cloying and self-loathing in a sort of Earth-good-people-bad way--Keanu Reeves is the most exciting thing about it...beware!
You can imagine my hesitation. Well, I finally ended up seeing it a few days ago at the dollar-theater, which is just about the lowest risk you can take with any film.
Surprise! I liked it. I didn't love it, but I was very pleasantly surprised. My professor wasn't wrong about it's Earth-good-people-bad aesthetic, but it wasn't nearly as severe in its underpinning conceit as Tomorrow was. It was actually quite well-written, and much more morally complex than the other film even tried to be. But even better, the science was very good, especially for a modern disaster movie. Typically, I just grit my teeth and endure the stupid, careless, disdainfully bad science that plagues these kinds of films. The worst thing about them is that they make audiences markedly dumber. But this under-appreciated remake made all the right decisions in that department, which is, for me, so very respectable. And it left me feeling really good. And excited in the way that only good science-fiction can accomplish.
I won't say anything else about the film. But know that at least one person with a relatively informed opinion was entertained and pleased by it.
Here's to good science-fiction.
