In celebration of the inaugural Brown Climate Week, the Brown Arts Institute screened director Roland Emmerich’s 2004 disaster of a movie “The Day After Tomorrow” as part of its ongoing “Rigorously Curated” film series.
During the event’s opening remarks, Vice President for Diversity and Inclusion Matthew Guterl announced: “You’re not gonna learn any science tonight.” Throughout the rest of the introduction, Guterl, BAI Director Sydney Skybetter and Professor of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences Baylor Fox-Kemper dogged on the movie’s numerous failings. It’s “nobody's idea of a great film,” Guterl said.
But no warnings could have prepared the audience for the unfathomable abomination that was about to play.
The movie follows paleoclimatologist Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid) as he attempts to warn politicians of an impending climate disaster after his research points to the possibility of a new ice age. While Hall expects the catastrophe to occur over the next century, it unfolds just a few weeks after he first raises the alarm at a United Nations conference.
As the government orders citizens in the southern half of the country to evacuate, Hall heads north to New York City, where his son Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal) is stranded in Manhattan on a high school decathlon trip. Sam, alongside friends Laura (Emmy Rossum), Brian (Arjay Smith) and J.D. (Austin Nichols), holes up in the New York Public Library with a motley crew of strangers, struggling to survive the destruction and freezing temperatures.
At the same time, ridiculous natural disasters are occurring across the globe — basketball-sized hail pelts Tokyo and tornadoes multiply in Los Angeles — but all pale in comparison to the tsunami that floods, and subsequently freezes over, Manhattan.
Each moment is more absurd than the last. After Laura develops sepsis from a cut on her leg, Sam, Brian and J.D. venture out in search of medicine aboard a massive ship frozen into the glacier that has swallowed Manhattan. On their journey, Sam must fend off a pack of timber wolves that have somehow made their way onto the vessel. Meanwhile, American refugees wade through the Rio Grande into Mexico.
If the laughable plot weren’t enough, attempts at social and political satire fall flat, undone by dialogue, delivery and special effects nearly as catastrophic as the disasters unfolding on screen.
This isn’t just a regular “bad” movie: “The Day After Tomorrow” is a shocking offense to any audience unfortunate enough to encounter it. In the Martinos Auditorium at the Granoff Center for the Creative Arts, the measly crowd could do little but laugh their way through two hours of filmic malfeasance.
Perhaps the only thing “The Day After Tomorrow” gets right is that there is no escaping climate catastrophe when it inevitably arrives. If luck prevails, the planet will freeze over before this movie is ever screened again.
Rebecca Goodman is a university news senior staff writer covering career and alumni. She is a junior from Cambridge, MA, studying English. Outside of writing, you can find her at the Avon or in the basement of the Rock.
