The Day After Tomorrow sees our unworthy little species pitted against the scariest woman since Baroness Thatcher: Mother Nature.
Producer Roland Emmerich has always fancied himself as the new (70s disaster king) Irwin Allen, and he went all out to bring us an apocalyptic cinema blockbuster that is visually stunning, somewhat hammy, and horrifying in equal measures.
Earthquakes, Hurricanes, huge, city-engulfing tidal waves and the onset of the new ice age, all with a human (if a tad shallow and American-centric) story, and all in 124 minutes.
It’s a disaster movie, and disaster movies always work best on the big screen. This film has a level of effects enduced visuals that I was in doubt would translate to the small screen of the PSP. Strangely they do. With the level and quality of the digital effects it appears almost seamless on the LCD screen and, holding it by hand as close as one does, it must have touched some personal chord when I found myself saying “Ohhh”, “Ahhh” and “Unlucky!” out load, to the amusement of my fellow commuters. It is what it is, and it works just great on the PSP.
The plot is simple, as truly this film is about the effects. Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid), scientist and environmental naysayer, finds the world falling apart around him. Hail stones the size of house bricks smash Japan, typhoons obliterate Los Angeles and a new Ice Age crosses the northern hemisphere. Jack must improbably yomp from Washington to New York, to be with his son and a small group of survivors who desperately try to fend off the cold as our planet flexes its climatic muscles.
In light of the American attitude to the Kyoto Accord and Global Warming, one can’t help but notice the irony, and gaze out of the window where tornados, these days, are even seen in Birmingham.
Movie: 3.5 out of 5