The Day After Tomorrow review

As the summer comes so the blockbusters arrive, although there's a distinctly chilly feel about Roland Emmerich's new film. Emmerich was responsible for the hugely successful Independence Day and subsequently the hugely atrocious Godzilla, so it's safe to assume he knows a thing or two by now about making mega-budget films. He's obviously learned from his mistakes with Godzilla, for while The Day After Tomorrow is pretty shallow in terms of plot and characterisation, it's a thoroughly enjoyable piece of Hollywood nonsense, with a pro-earth message running through the film.

Dennis Quaid stars as Jack Hall, a renowned meteorologist following a futile mission to explain to the world's leaders that they need to change their ways now in order to preserve the planet for tomorrow. When Hall is contacted by his colleague Terry Rapson (Ian Holm), who explains that there are sudden and dramatic unexplained drops in temperature in the North Atlantic, it can only mean one thing - the world is on the brink of a new ice age.

Cue scenes of mass devastation of Los Angeles, in an impressive sequence which sees the city all but wiped out by tornadoes. Plummeting temperatures wreak havoc across the states, with New York under threat of total destruction. The personal trauma for Hall is compounded by the fact that his son Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal) is stranded in the Big Apple on a school trip, holed up burning books in the public library as the city freezes around him.

While there are some ludicrous moments scattered throughout the film (most of them concerning Quaid, who decides to walk to New York from Washington to rescue his son with the immortal line "I've walked further in the snow"), it's tongue in cheek stuff which raises a titter more often than not. There are also some nice quasi-political moments, such as the mass evacuation of the Southern United States to camps in Mexico - in a reversal of normality we see thousands of Americans fleeing for their lives across the Rio Grande.

The special effects are top notch, and blindingly spectacular on the big screen. This is most evident in the destruction of New York, and the silent arrival of an oil tanker down one of the city's streets is one of the film's visual highlights. Of course, at the end of the day everything resolves itself more or less happily, and despite being a Hollywood blockbuster there is even a green message to the film: act now or we won't be around tomorrow. Even Al Gore has been reported as saying this is a film everyone should watch. To be perfectly honest, there are a lot worse ways of spending two hours.