What
are they smoking in Hollywood? Summer’s the time for mindless (and lucrative)
blockbusters, but things haven’t quite gone to plan this year. First Troy
turned out to be a tough, intelligent anti-war film with obvious resonance to
the situation in Iraq, and now The Day After Tomorrow is a sharp
environmentalist j’accuse with Dick Cheney as its main villain. At this
rate, Harry Potter will be a tract against child labour and Shrek 2 a
metaphor for the abuse at Abu Ghraib.
Nor
is this stuff buried deep down, where only subtext-loving academics can dig it
out. We first see the US Vice-President as he’s trashing the Kyoto Accord at a
seminar on global warming (“Our economy is every bit as fragile as the
environment”), much to the chagrin of climatologist hero Dennis Quaid. Later
we also see the President, and there’s no mistaking which President he’s
supposed to be, taking off his baseball cap with a vacant expression as he sits
silently through a Cabinet meeting, his only contribution being to ask the
Cheney figure, “What do you think we should do?” Hollywood’s a well-known
Democratic hotbed – assiduously courted by President Clinton – and seems to
have decided to show its opposition to Bush in the most public way possible,
through its traditionally apolitical ‘summer movies’.
But
it’s not just the present Administration that gets rebuked in The Day After
Tomorrow (Bush actually ends up a semi-sympathetic, if ineffectual, figure).
This is a disaster movie about global warming, but it doesn’t destroy the
whole globe – only the rich, industrialised First World. It’s true we see
snowstorms in New Delhi, and hear warnings that the world is about to be plunged
into a new Ice Age – but the final count shows half the Earth more or less
unaffected. Only Europe and North America are buried in ice, as a kind of divine
retribution for their fossil-fuel burning and anti-ecological policies.
Again,
none of this is coded or obscure. The film gets much mileage out of US refugees
going south into Mexico, which finally closes its borders – leading to illegal
immigrants trying to cross the Rio Grande in the opposite direction than is
usually the case, and the film duly gets a TV reporter to point out this
“dramatic reversal of illegal immigration”. The Mexicans finally agree to re-open
their border – but only after ‘Dick Cheney’ agrees to write off Latin
America’s entire foreign debt! In the end, a chastened Cheney praises his
Third World hosts, implicitly promising a brighter future. “Have you ever seen
the air so clear?” muses an astronaut, looking down on the half-icy planet.
Director
Roland Emmerich hails from Germany, one of Europe’s Greenest countries, and no
doubt feels strongly about these matters – but he’s also, I suspect, doing
penance for his biggest hit, the 1996 Independence Day in which America
notoriously (and single-handedly) saved the planet from alien invasion. There,
the US was a military titan; here, it’s a victim – and it doesn’t take
much to link the change to a new international mood, post-9/11. There are clear
echoes of that disaster in the storm-shattered buildings and fleeing crowds of
New Yorkers, as well as a strange emphasis on “Western civilisation” which
the survivors try to protect or hold on to (its symbol is a Gutenberg Bible, the
first-ever printed book, deftly blending religious values with the “Age of
Reason”). One memorable shot shows the Statue of Liberty – as much a New
York emblem as the late lamented World Trade Center – neck-deep in the rising
waters, its torch held aloft like the arm of a drowning man.
All
this gives The Day After Tomorrow unexpected personality, putting it
firmly in the box marked ‘Interesting’. But what about the box marked ‘A
Good Night Out At The Movies’? That’s where things get problematic, though
at least two-thirds of the film is quite effective.
The
set-up is surprisingly imaginative, going from vignette to vignette as the
mother of all storms builds up. Zoo animals are restless. Flocks of birds appear
in the sky, migrating south at top speed. Weather buoys show alarming drops in
temperature, appearing as beeping red lights on a computer screen. A weatherman
goes for a quickie, leaving his post unmanned (“What weather? This is LA!”),
only to be called back by hysterical reports of mass destruction. The special
effects, when they arrive, are sensational – skyscrapers slowly icing over, or
a “wall of water” swelling on the coast of Manhattan. Landscapes and giant,
featureless things have always been what computers do best (as opposed to living
things, which are often unconvincing).
Emmerich
isn’t subtle; the film is often soapy and melodramatic – will the ambulance
arrive for the cancer-stricken little boy? will Quaid’s best friend cut the
rope, plunging to his death in order to save them both? – but that’s
forgivable. Let’s not forget it’s a disaster movie, following in the cheesy
footsteps of The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno (or Daylight
and Dante’s Peak, to cite more recent examples). The problem, quite
simply, is that it has no third act.
The
first third is tense, the middle third – all that mass destruction –
spectacular. But then what? Once the enormity of the situation is clear, once
‘Bush’ and ‘Cheney’ have begun evacuating everyone and people either run
for their lives or stay indoors, trying to wait it out, the film has nowhere to
go. Its solution is a frankly ludicrous sub-plot, with Quaid walking across the
snow from D.C. to NYC, trying to reach his teenage son who’s trapped in the
New York Public Library with the eye of the storm drawing nearer.
But
why must Quaid do this? He himself has been telling people to stay
indoors; he knows his son is safer in a building than out on the street. What
does he hope to do, even if he does find him – carry him back to Washington on
his back? The answer, presumably, is to make up for all the times when he
wasn’t there for him as a father, but it all seems puny and lame compared to
the apocalypse raging around them. Emmerich had the same problem in Independence
Day, distracting from the action with glib father-son bonding (as Mark Steyn
puts it in The Spectator: “Emmerich may not be in favour of global
warming, but he’s in favour of global heartwarming”). Or, to paraphrase
Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca: “It doesn’t take much to see that the
problems of two little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy
world”.
In
short, The Day After Tomorrow peters out – but it’s still more
pleasant surprise than disappointment. Blockbusters have seemed increasingly
hollow and formulaic in recent years, but maybe the Bush years have now given
Hollywood the focus it lacked, some kind of target to aim at while spending all
those millions on eye-popping FX. Maybe they’ll even go the next step, using
some of those millions to actually fund the Good Causes they so piously warn us
about. Don’t hold your breath…