Viewing Date: May 30, 2004 The Day After Tomorrow is the required summer disaster movie of the summer. Made in the fine tradition of Deep Impact and Armageddon, I went into this movie expecting nothing but special effects and another interesting look at how the world could end for all of us, and of course it will be avoided at the last minute.

This time it is the effects of global warming, which incidentally, causes the rapid onset of a new ice age. Of course, in the movie it all happens entirely too fast with very little scientific explanation for why it happens - the closest they get is that the desalinization of the oceans screws up the north atlantic current, making all of that warm equator water not go north and causing serious weather problems, including huge hurricanes on land which insta-freeze anything that is in the center.

The director or writer in this movie tries entirely too hard in order to get the audience to care about his characters. The mad scientist who predicts it has a son who goes to New York which is (surprise, surprise) in the path of a big storm. So is his wife, who conveniently works in a cancer ward for children. Look everyone, it’s a little kid with cancer! You have to care about him! The only way he could have made it more obvious would be to put a shipment of widdle cute puppies on it’s way to the storm driven by a cadre of third-world children hoping to sell them for money to save their baseball field in the south pacific. It’s okay though, because I wasn’t expecting a great plot from this movie.

What I was expecting from the movie was good special effects. Unfortunately the movie didn’t deliver very well. Sure, they had the ocean rising, and Los Angeles being destroyed by tornadoes (which I was almost cheering at), but the main destruction wasn’t accompanied by a requirement of all good special effects: large explosions. The only explosions in the movie are the crashing of three helicopters, which shouldn’t have exploded anyway because they crashed due to their fuel freezing. Now that I think about it they may not have exploded at all.

Errors in the movie are numerous I am sure, but I just sat back and vegged out after I saw the cancer kid. The movie is remarkably horrible, even for such a low standard as a summer disaster movie. Don’t go see it, even if it’s playing in the cheap seats the day after tomorrow, or on DVD the tuesday after next. I give it a -10.