In May 2004, James Mottram of the BBC asked Roland Emmerich, “Would you hope [The Day After Tomorrow] will encourage people to think about the environment?” The director was unambiguous: “I think so. At the very beginning, we said: ‘That's the blueprint.’ It's young people who watch movies. Kids now have all this information, but they're not really political, and it's really hard to reach them with a documentary or a newspaper article. So a film is not a bad forum to present them with these issues, even if they go with their friends and just discuss for five minutes afterwards whether it will be possible. But I think this film defies age groups and gender-groups. It's very wide.”
In a year rich with great films now recognized as classics of their kind—Collateral, Anchorman, Fahrenheit 9/11, Napoleon Dynamite, The Notebook, Man on Fire, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Kill Bill Vol. 2 and Quentin Tarantino’s appearance as guest judge on American Idol—Emmerich’s weather disaster movie came and went like any nor’easter, making plenty of money ($552 million against a $125 million budget) but not much of an immediate impact. George W. Bush won reelection, scientists continued to scream about the climate, and Democrats had a constant campaign slogan: “YOU WILL DIE.”
22 years later, our cities remain above water, and the climate is no longer the number one pet topic for the left. Everyone can laugh at The Day After Tomorrow now free of political peer pressure, appalled and fascinated by the melodrama, the mixed bag of special effects, and the very serious tone. Through the entire disaster trend of the 1970s, there wasn’t a single movie as self-serious and lacking in humor as The Day After Tomorrow. 20th-century cinema couldn’t realize overhead shots of Manhattan flooded by tsunamis, or tornadoes destroying Los Angeles; spectacles of the 2000s focused on increasingly apocalyptic scenarios, such as Knowing, 2012, Cloverfield, Signs, War of the Worlds, and The Happening. After Hollywood made a raft of military movies in the wake of 9/11—and ran out of movies delayed because of 9/11—the event continued to be evoked cinema through images of the end of the world.
In one of the movie’s most absurd moments, President Perry King negotiates a deal with a deal to let people cross the border into Mexico, “forgiving all Latin American debt.” Emmy Rossum tells Jake Gyllenhaal, “I spent my whole life preparing for a world that no longer exists. You were right—it was all for nothing.” This is a Millennial tenet, taken and imbibed at the dawn of the century and propagated well into adulthood. Even if climate change isn’t as bad or Emmerich or Al Gore said it was, the sense that “nothing matters anyway” permeates much of Millennial life, at least that which has been manipulated and abused by the media. People who never believed in global warming in the first place are better off, having never worried about a future that’s no longer politically salient.
Los Angeles had snow in 1949. Blizzards on the East Coast remain irregular but not unusual. There wasn’t a single major hurricane last year. Systemic racism, ICE, Israel, healthcare executives, and assorted billionaires are more of a priority for Millennial liberals, indoctrinated from a young age to believe that leaders were about to allow the world to end. In the event of apocalypse, any justification will do. The ends justify the means in apocalypses of all kinds: of the climate, of the body, of the mind, of the soul. The world we were prepared for, where “the arc of history always bends towards justice,” no longer exists. The Day After Tomorrow is a key text in our development.
Today, the film’s dated special effects look much better on videotape; as a summer 2004 tentpole, The Day After Tomorrow was one of the last major films to be released on tape, and its arctic sunsets and harrowing twisters and waves pop in cropped 1:33, as opposed to the muddy and blue 2:35:1 presentation found on DVD, Blu-Ray, and streaming. There are no characters, just movie stars: Jake Gyllenhaal, Dennis Quaid, Ian Holm, and dozens upon dozens of actors who’ve plateaued or faded into obscurity (although it’s always nice seeing Rick Hoffman, here a line-cutter on the bus). It’s not a preachy or didactic movie, and its political sensationalism is overwhelmed by the sheer force of the images, so close to the footage of 9/11. The Day After Tomorrow was also teased six months in advance, with a teaser trailer released online in late-2003. I watched that trailer hundreds of times, and saw the movie once. By then, I got the message, and carried it with me for too many years.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @NARCFILM