FilmBlather.com

"And that behind me, that's a tornado!"

There's stupid, mindless, popcorn fun, and then there's just stupid; there's hilarious high camp, and then there's just bad writing. Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference. Take two of this year's summer movies: Stephen Sommers' gothic extravaganza Van Helsing and the Roland Emmerich disaster epic The Day After Tomorrow. Both films share presumably unflattering characteristics: an utter disregard for logic, stilted dialogue, dunderheaded romantic subplots, and a complete reliance on CGI effects to save the day. So why, then, is Van Helsing a jolly good show and The Day After Tomorrow a catastrophe in more ways than one? Simple: the former film knows exactly what it's doing, while the latter is fumbling around on a cold, dark soundstage, convinced it's pursuing a noble environmentalist agenda as it elicits nearly audible cringes from audiences nationwide. It's not an issue of elegant vs. cheesy or high-brow vs. low-brow; it's a matter of smart vs. dumb.

Yes, I'm bloody well aware that intelligence of any sort is not something one should expect from a disaster flick, but surely there are alternatives to the ceaseless turgidity and painful earnestness that Emmerich (Independence Day, Godzilla) and his co-writer Jeffrey Nachmanoff force-feed us here. Deep Impact, the other movie featuring Jake Gyllenhaal and a gigantic tidal wave, gave intelligence a shot and succeeded partially, at the very least managing not to insult the audience. If you thought Mimi Leder's film had more than a little in common with a particularly overblown Lifetime movie-of-the-week, wait until you get a load of this one, which interrupts its $125 million disaster to bring you... the scientist's wife refusing to abandon a random kid dying of cancer!

Though it would have been nice of Fox to shell out for a screenwriter, their money was, I must admit, well-spent: the computer-generated doom that Emmerich unleashes upon the unsuspecting world must surely be the most realistic and awe-inspiring images of destruction ever put to film. As hurricanes literally take over the globe, ice starts falling from the sky in Tokyo, a giant wall of water descends on Manhattan and, eventually, everything north of Virginia turns into a block of ice. It looks spectacular. I cannot lie.

But by the time the halfway mark comes around, most of the astonishing is behind us, at which point we're forced to watch a gaggle of people we'd prefer to harpoon get themselves into laughably contrived situations that often have little to do with the ice age that has taken over half the planet. I understand the desire to give the proceedings a personal dimension, but there's just no way IÕm going to care about one sick kid in a hospital bed -- no matter how stalwart or long-suffering or cute he is -- when there's a world out there needing to be saved. Nor am I going to weep for Sam Hall (Gyllenhaal), the genius high schooler who pines after a girl on his scholastic decathlon team only to watch her fancy a rich kid from an opposing school. I'd be more concerned about his father (Dennis Quaid), the similarly brilliant climatologist who first screams bloody murder about global warming only to be ignored, but he spends the first half of the film being useless, and the second half trekking across snowy expanses and attempting to overcome traditional (and boring) hiking/mountain-climbing obstacles that seemed so much more exciting in Touching the Void. And then there are the wolves. In a film about the impending apocalypse, could no one think of anything more inspired than having the characters attacked by rampaging wolves?

The dialogue contains the most horrendously leaden disaster movie exposition since Volcano -- my personal favorite consists of Quaid's character insisting that the Atlantic Ocean "has reached a critical desalinization point" only to have it be confirmed that indeed, this "would explain the extreme weather we've been having!" Once we get past the exposition stage, Emmerich switches to intolerable message-mongering, as characters have dramatic changes of heart, Dennis Quaid pronounces that we must all learn from our mistakes, and everyone finally comes to the conclusion that we cannot blithely use up our natural resources without fear of the consequences. Seriously, I'm so proud of mankind I could burst.

Comic relief comes at regular intervals. A group of people stuck in a library decides to burn books for warmth, and a character unloads the immortal line: "Hey guys! There is a whole section down here on tax law that we can burn!" There is a homeless guy around to provide yuks (he's funny because he's homeless, and he wears a plastic bag on his head, you see). One joke does hit the mark -- an effective, if simplistic, jab at U.S. foreign policy -- but the vast majority are cheap, and stupid, and ineffectively calculated to balance the incessantly portentous tone of everything else (complete with monotonous, booming soundtrack).

Just about the worst thing that can happen to a summer tentpole blockbuster is when people want it to stop (anyone remember Wild Wild West?). With its idiotic, front-loaded structure and consistently D-level screenwriting, The Day After Tomorrow should earn the public's ill will fairly quickly. Perhaps, like Van Helsing, the movie is intentionally cheesy and lame, but I doubt it. And even if it is, it doesn't entertain.