CINESCAPE previews THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW

A dog barks. A sky already crowded with dark clouds fills with flocking birds on the move. Zoo animals howl in their cages. A scientist (Ian Holm) warns, "We've found something unusual ... and disturbing." Another scientist played by Dennis Quaid wonders what can be done and is told, "It's too late." Rain slams down from the heavens, lightning spiderwebs above and flooding of Biblical proportions commences. The Statue of Liberty is engulfed by a giant tidal wave. Hurricanes, hail, tornadoes, panic in the streets and ultimately, we see a New York City half-buried in white as the new Ice Age begins.

Based on the trailer, director Roland Emmerich's THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW looks like one of the most effective disaster films to come down the pike in well, maybe ever. The footage doesn't contain enough scenes of human drama to let us judge whether this will help or hinder the movie's impact, but it is genuinely exciting.

The special effects look suitably epic and the premise is just plausible enough to be genuinely troubling.

Weather Channel meteorologist Jim Cantore explains TOMORROW's basis in reality in depicting global warming run amok: "I think to have it happen in one day is highly unlikely, but we've seen hints already. Some of these events happening, like that [lethal] heat wave in Europe I think those are little messages that the atmosphere is trying to tell us, that we've done something a little extreme to it."

The TOMORROW trailer is screened, appropriately enough, on a wall of ice inside The Ice Factory in Van Nuys, CA. Breath mists in the chill air and there is ice on the pipes overhead that keeps plummeting down onto the heads of assembled journalists and actor Jake Gyllenhaal, who plays Quaid's adolescent son in the film. He welcomes everyone to the trailer's debut: "It is my pleasure to introduce to you the deep-freeze premiere."

Gyllenhaal is optimistic about TOMORROW's chances of both being embraced as popular entertainment and still taken seriously: "With LORD OF THE RINGS, people have started to notice if you have a really great cast in a big action movie, it can be really good."

There's no doubt that director Emmerich is still a perfectionist about his visuals. "There's a shot in the movie," Gyllenhaal recalls, "where I jump over two cars. I thought, 'That's great!' Roland said, 'That sucks, do it again!' "

Although he agrees with Cantore that TOMORROW's portrayal of global warming causing an overnight catastrophe is dramatic license, Gyllenhaal feels that the film's overall warning is sound: "This will probably be one of the first movies of this kind that will actually scare you."

Elaborating, Gyllenhaal

Jake Gyllenhaal is wading into trouble in Roland Emmerich's THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW.

© 20th Century Fox (photo: Takashi Seida)

Seeing the dangers dramatized makes the concepts more accessible, Gyllenhaal believes. "I don't mean to criticize science, but I think when you hear it from people who are expert in drama, it changes the way you look at it. It doesn't make it any more or less important, but it does change the way you look at it. So reading the script, being involved in these [big action] scenes, I started thinking to myself, 'Could this actually happen?' And everyone was saying it could and I just couldn't get it into my head, and as I realized I had a lot of resources I could go to, because this movie is so large and because I could say to somebody, 'I really want to learn about the environment, can I talk to this person?' I could call someone and they'd say, 'Sure, you have this movie we'll talk to you.' So it gave me a lot of power that I wouldn't normally have. I talked to a lot of scientists, and as I talked to them, I realized that this is an extremely, really pertinent situation."

The film has inspired Gyllenhaal to make some changes in his own day to day life: "I learned from the NRDC [National Resources Defense Council] that power plants and cars if we change those two ways of emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, we can change global warming. So I'm on a list for a hybrid car and I'm trying to work as hard as I can with all the environmental organizations I've gotten involved with after having done this movie and trying to raise money and talk to people and use my voice however people want to hear it."

"It depends on how the message is delivered," meteorologist Cantore says of whether audiences will share Gyllenhaal's reaction to the final film. "It's a very complicated message, because the climate changes with or without humans, but what we're saying is, as humans, we have changed it. To what extent, we don't know yet. We don't know if the Earth can recover from that."

What does meteorologist Cantore think is the most important environmental question posed by THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW? "Is there any way that we can make everybody take this seriously?"