Movie review: "The Day After Tomorrow" (2004)

Author's note: The following review was published in Spanish language on my Hive blog in June 5th, 2021. It may contain spoilers.

Jack Hall, a paleoclimatologist, announces in Delhi, India, a discouraging message: climate change is accelerating and that in a century those changes will cause an imbalance in Nature. To try to repair the damage, a series of actions must be implemented. Nobody took him seriously... Until it was late.

The Day After Tomorrow is a film directed by Roland Emmerich and starred by Dennis Quaid, Jake Gyllenhaal, Ian Holm and Emmy Rossum. It's inspired by the book The Coming Global Superstorm by Art Bell and Whitley Striber.

I've seen this film a couple of times: the first time was in a high school Ecology class, and the second was at home. In fact, it brought me a certain nostalgia, since the subject of climate change was one of the subjects of greatest interest to my late grandfather (RIP); I remember that, after seeing this film, he criticized the exaggeration of the visual effects when it comes to portraying the potential consequences of the phenomenon in question, as well as the impossibility of some particular phenomena such as the formation of cyclones on land. "Global warming wouldn't cause a cooling", I remember he told me that time before we went to sleep.

Emmerich made a real gem in terms of disaster cinema, because it's not presented with a spectacular and exaggerated disaster but also invites us, even today, to reflect on that question that makes many uncomfortable and scares few: What will we leave to our descendants tomorrow? Or, reframing it in a darker way: In what state will we leave the planet once we go extinct? Perhaps the last question bothers many of us, but it's something that the film, in a very subtle way, raises in the face of what is happening today on the environment.

That point is what makes the film worth watching apart, of course, of the clichéd "family in danger" subplot that has been seen repeatedly across different disaster films, albeit very compelling on the part of the actors.