Image copyright © by Marcus Trahan

The Day After Tomorrow

(2004)

If you ignore the fact that it is relentlessly stupid, poorly written, scientifically laughable, and totally predictable … it’s actually kind of good. By that I mean that sometimes I’m in the mood for a big, mindless adventure on the big, big, big screen, and today I was in that mood. This is a throwback to the old days of the big “disaster” movie, which was begun by The Poseidon Adventure, which I also liked. It’s like those movies: big and dumb, but with SFX that actually convince, rather than looking like models filmed in slow motion, as in Earthquake. A smarter script and characters you can believe in wouldn’t have hurt, as in, say, Deep Impact, but you can’t have everything. And any way you look at it, it’s a better use of $100 million worth of CGI than Van Helsing.