The Day After Tomorrow

Saw The Day After Tomorrow yesterday, a week after its release. To me it seemed like Roland Emmerich had some messages weighing down his chest that he had to release to humanity as soon as possible and being a film maker he did what he always did - he made a film. The story is so made up, with a real loose plot, without any coherence or valid explanations, but the special effects are fantastic. The kind fifty years from now, some teenager watching the same movie would exclaim in appreciation, "Man, thats some special effects for a movie that old!"

The Day After Tomorrow,is where finally film makers have caught up with the environmentalists and have overtaken them sans effort. There are lavish CGI powered scenes like New York in a big freeze with a scene stealer of an accelerated super freeze of Empire States Building with windows popping out, snow blizzards in New Delhi and LA ripped open by tornadoes starting of course with the ripping off of the Hollywood sign on the hills.

Environmental activists who worked with Day After Tomorrow said that the exposure and media coverage they got while shooting the film was many times more than the what they received from decades of activism! Experts at Lawrence-Berkeley lab in CA warn that although the climatic changes in the movie take place at a fast-forward pace which in real time might take decades, the cause(the changes in the Gulf Stream) and the effects might be the same but not on such a compressed scale of time as depicted in the movie. In other interesting news, related to the movie, on April 1, 2004 NASA issued a memo saying, "No one from NASA is to do interviews or otherwise comment on anything having to do with ... " the film, “The Day After Tomorrow.” (which they later retracted).

A global climatic change in a compressed time scale of a few days does give tremendous freedom for CGI and special effect artists, but if it succeeds in making the Americans with behemoth SUVs who drive 6liter-V8 engines in the urban jungles of San Francisco or New York (why do u need an SUV to drive in a city, to make up for you small u-know-what?), to take a second look on their choice of personal transportation, that’s the best that Hollywood can do for the environmental cause.