'Day After Tomorrow': A lot of hot air

Back to the Hollyweird Stoopid Stars page
Back to the Enviro-Nazi Page

24May2004

By Patrick J. Michaels

As a scientist, I bristle when lies dressed up as "science" are used to influence political discourse. The latest example is the global-warming disaster flick, The Day After Tomorrow.

This film is propaganda designed to shift the policy of this nation on climate change. At least that's what I take from producer Mark Gordon's comment that "part of the reason we made this movie" was to "raise consciousness about the environment."

Fox spokesman Jeffrey Godsick says, "The real power of the movie is to raise consciousness on the issue of (global warming)."

'Nuff said.

Oh, the plot. Global warming causes the Gulf Stream to shut down. This current normally brings tropical warmth northward and makes Europe much more comfortable than it should be at its northerly latitude. The heat stays stuck in the tropics, the polar regions get colder, and the atmosphere suddenly flips over in a "superstorm." The frigid stratosphere trades places with our habitable troposphere, and in a matter of days, an ice age ensues. Temperatures drop 100 degrees an hour in Canada. Hurricanes ravage Belfast. Folks in Japan are clobbered by bowling-ball-size hailstones. If we had only listened to concerned scientists and stopped global warming when we could.

Each one of these phenomena is physically impossible.

Start with the Gulf Stream. Carl Wunsch, a professor of physical oceanography at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, knows more about ocean currents than most anyone. He thinks the nonsense in The Day After Tomorrow detracts from the seriousness of the global-warming issue. So he recently wrote in the prestigious science journal Nature that the scenario depicted in the movie requires one to "turn off the wind system, or to stop the Earth's rotation, or both."

The stratosphere will become the troposphere when all three laws of thermodynamics are repealed. Hailstones can't reach bowling-ball size because their growth is limited by gravity. Hurricanes can't hit Belfast because the intervening island of Ireland would destroy them.

How do I know so much about a movie that isn't out yet? I've seen the promos, and I've read and reviewed the book upon which it is based, The Coming Global Superstorm by Art Bell and Whitley Strieber. In Strieber's previous work, Communion, he explained that he was told of the Earth's upcoming apocalypse by aliens. And how this knowledge was communicated is much more the purview of an adult Web site than a family newspaper. What's on the movie's Web site is worse — nothing but out-and-out distortion.

It also insists that what is depicted on the screen has already started.

"Did you know," says the site, that there were more tornadoes recorded in May 2003 than in any other month?

I looked up federal tornado statistics, and indeed they're going up, and there was a peak in May 2003. Then I determined the number of radar stations and their type. When our first radar-tracking network was established in the 1960s and '70s, the number of tornadoes rose proportionally, then leveled off until the new Doppler radars came online in 1988. It took a decade to put this system in place, and the number of reported tornadoes went up accordingly.

Then I plotted the number of severe tornadoes. If anything, it's going down. So the flashy Doppler radars are merely detecting more weak storms that cause little, if any, damage.

The Web site also implies that global warming is making hurricanes worse. Christopher Landsea, the world's most aptly named hurricane scientist, has studied the maximum winds in these storms as measured by aircraft and finds a significant decline.

Global warming? Some scientists think climate change strengthens El Niño, the large atmospheric oscillation responsible for a variety of weather — both good and bad. El Niños are known to rip apart hurricanes. So it's more likely that climate change is weakening these storms than enhancing them.

Will Godsick and Gordon get their way? They're sure being aided and abetted by MoveOn.org, the liberal advocacy group and billionaire George Soros' policy toy. They've got Al Gore front and center, plumping the film. They've got their Web site using the movie to drum up support for legislation by Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions, which only failed by 12 votes last fall. There's a huge drought out West, which a New York Times editorial blamed on global warming. The issue is hot enough to influence votes out there.

Remember that humans have slightly warmed the planet some in recent decades, but the correlation between Western drought and warming is zero.

Far be it from me to criticize anyone's freedom of expression. But remember that propaganda can have consequences. McCain's and Lieberman's measure mimics the United Nations' infamous Kyoto Protocol on global warming, which many scientists know will do nothing measurable about planetary temperature within the policy-relevant future. But it will cost money.

This isn't Hollywood's first attempt to scare people into its way of thinking. How about Jane Fonda in the 1979 anti-nuclear-power flick, The China Syndrome?

Twelve days after its release, the accident at Three Mile Island occurred. Despite the fact that it released only tiny amounts of radiation, the politics of that hysteria effectively killed any new nuclear plant.

Analogize the Western drought to Three Mile Island, and you get the idea.

Or how about the 1983 movie The Day After, whose purpose was to strengthen the nuclear-freeze movement. It failed.

The Day After Tomorrow is only one more day than The Day After, and it deserves the same fate. Lies cloaked as science should never determine how we live our lives.

Patrick J. Michaels is senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute and author of the upcoming book, Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians and the Media.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2004-05-24-michaels_x.htm

The Day After Tomorrow

Tue May 25, 8:00 PM ET

Todd McCarthy, STAFF

A 20th Century Fox release of a Centropolis Entertainment/Lions Gate/Mark Gordon Co. production. Produced by Gordon, Roland Emmerich. Executive producers, Ute Emmerich, Kelly Van Horn, Stephanie Germain. Co-producer, Thomas M. Hammel. Directed by Roland Emmerich. Screenplay, Emmerich, Jeffrey Nachimanoff; story, Emmerich, suggested in part by the book "The Coming Global Superstorm" by Art Bell and Whitley Strieber.

Jack Hall - Dennis QuaidSam Hal - Jake GyllenhaalTerry Rapson - Ian HolmLaura Chapman - Emmy RossumDr. Lucy Hall - Sela WardJason Evans - Dash MihokVice President Becker - Kenneth WelshFrank Harris - Jay O. SandersJ.D. - Austin NicholsPresident Blake - Perry KingGomez - Nestor SerranoSimon - Adrian LesterJudith - Sheila McCarthyBrian Parks - Arjay SmithLuther - Glenn PlummerJanet Tokada - Tamlyn Tomita (news)

A loose remake of "Independence Day" with weather as the villain rather than aliens, "The Day After Tomorrow" is a disarmingly pulpy, eye-popping disaster movie during its first half, and an increasingly dull survival melodrama during its second. With the muscular assistance of some spectacular special effects depicting the devastation of New York and Los Angeles in particular, this latest End of Western Civilization pop-culture artifact plays fast and loose with science and environmental theory to engineer a paranoid fantasy about global warming causing a new Ice Age. With media coverage already pushing "Is this possible?" angles, Fox can expect very warm early summer B.O. Stateside and even better results internationally (where it opens imminently in 110 markets) for this old-fashioned mankind-vs.-the-elements speculative fiction epic.

As demonstrated in most of his previous pics, from "Moon 44" through "Independence Day" and "Godzilla," director Roland Emmerich's sensibilities, and perhaps his heart as well, reside in '50s-era B-movie sci-fi. His career-making trick has rested in taking cheesy material and elevating it just enough, through casting and effects, to reach contempo blockbuster proportions. His screenplays, however, rep little advance on those they emulate.

And so it is with this new outing, another doomsday scenario that, in the manner it imagines global peril and paralysis at the sudden onset of temperature-plunging storms, also recalls the more recent cycle of natural-disaster extravaganzas that included "Twister," "Deep Impact" and "Armageddon."

After nearly floating away on a Rhode Island-sized block of ice that cracks off the Antarctic Shelf, dashing climatologist Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid (news)) startles a New Delhi environmental conference -- and pisses off the Dick Cheney (news - web sites)-like U.S. vice president in attendance (Kenneth Welsh) -- with his "sensationalist claims" about the paradoxically frigid consequences of now-upon-us global warming.

Lo and behold, it starts snowing in Delhi, and pic's first reel surveys the inclement weather from Scotland and Japan to Washington, D.C., and outer space, where international astronauts can view the enormous storm systems beginning to spin down through the northern hemisphere.

Although Tokyo gets popped by a torrent of giant hailstones, first city to really take it on the chin is L.A. Hollywood and Vine is revisited by much better special effects than demolished it in "Earthquake" three decades back, as multiple tornadoes convincingly lay waste to such landmarks as the Hollywood sign and the Capitol Records building.

As Scottish ocean currents specialist Professor Terry Rapson (Ian Holm (news)) charts the rapid decline in ocean temperatures and suggests melting ice is putting too much fresh water into the seas, Hall comes under pressure to turn his theories into actual weather predictions. At the same time, his bright teenage son Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal (news)) decides to fly to New York for an academic decathlon, arriving shortly before a wall of water hits Gotham.

These scenes, which begin with a tsunami all but engulfing the Statue of Liberty and then flooding Manhattan, are perhaps the most impressive in the picture. The frequent aerial views of water surging through the streets are eerie and dramatically convincing, and while some of the setups, with people running and cars and busses flipping, are virtually identical to those in "Independence Day," there's nothing in that film to match the shot that assumes the p.o.v. of a surfer atop a tidal wave as it surges through midtown. Pic's action-packed first hour ends with Hall ominously predicting, "In seven to 10 days, we'll be in a new Ice Age."

While there are some spectacular sights still in store, notably the freezing-to-the-cracking-point of the Empire State Building and other structures, second half quickly becomes a slog.

On his father's advice, Sam remains sheltered in the 42nd Street main branch of the New York Public Library with a few friends, which allows for a rote romance to develop between him and smart classmate Laura (Emmy Rossum (news)). Hall's doctor wife, Lucy (Sela Ward (news)), figures in scenes that are even more tedious, as she remains behind at a hospital to care for a bedridden boy rather than remove herself from harm's way.

Most ludicrous of all, Hall himself decides to don snow-trekking equipment and trudge through the snow all the way from Philadelphia to New York (in temperatures dropping by 10 degrees per minute) on the off-chance of locating and rescuing Sam. Unfortunately, the long march is so unconvincing and dull to watch that it serves to chill pic's excitement level at an equally precipitous rate, just as it refocuses dramatic attention from the grandly global to the pallidly personal. Ultimate resolution to the overall crisis is disappointingly ho-hum.

Still, there are occasional little kicks to enjoy. Portrayal of the U.S. president (Perry King) is amusing; when confronted with the predicament, he immediately turns to the VP and asks, "What do you think we should do?" Better still is a subversive little plot twist that turns the historical immigration tables, with millions of Americans fleeing the unendurable weather by busting through the closed border with Mexico. And when the U.S. president finally goes on television at the end to report on the state of the nation, he does so on the Weather Channel.

"The Day After Tomorrow" goes beyond the far-fetched into the preposterous, but the first half delivers enough of what people want and expect from disaster pictures, and there are enough money-shot special effects, that auds probably will be more satisfied than not.

Cast members have no special demands made upon them beyond looking concerned and, alternately, foolishly brave, and coin was spent where it counts, in putting some images onscreen that haven't been seen before, or at least haven't been conveyed so convincingly. That should be enough.

Camera (Deluxe color, widescreen), Ueli Steiger; editor, David Brenner; music, Harald Kloser; production designer, Barry Chusid; supervising art directors, Tom Reta, Claude Pare; art directors, Martin Gendron, Michele Laliberte, Real Proulx, Marc Bonin; set decorator, Victor J. Zolfo; costume designer, Renee April; sound (Dolby/DTS), Don Cohen; supervising sound editors, Mark Stoeckinger, Larry Kemp; visual effects supervisor, Karen E. Goulekas; special visual effects and animation, Industrial Light & Magic; ILM visual effects supervisors, Ric Brevig, Jim Mitchell; visual effects and animation, the Orphanage; special visual effects and digital animation, Digital Domain; visual effects, Hydraulx, Tweak Films, yU+co[efx], Zoic Studios, Ring of Fire Studios, Dreamscape Imagery, Efilm; associate producers, Kim H. Winther, Lawrence Inglee; assistant director, Winther; stunt coordinators, Charlie Brewer (Los Angeles, El Paso), Branko Racki (Montreal); casting, April Webster. Reviewed at the National Theater, Los Angeles, May 25, 2004. MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 123 MIN.

Copyright © 2004 Yahoo! Inc