THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW

In a funny and unexpected way, THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW sort of gets to have its filmic cake and eat it, too. Yes, it is the epitome of a big-budget special effects extravaganza that has visuals that couldn't have been achieved five minutes ago, wedded to a big studio disaster movie ethos that could have been made any time in about the last 40 years. However, it also has a surprising (given its crowd-pleasing mandate) agitprop environmentalist attitude that gives it a cheerfully subversive air that one doesn't normally associate with this kind of fare.

Climatologist Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid) has research that shows global warming may make life very tough in a hundred years or so. The U.S. government, particularly the anti-environmentalist Vice-President (Kenneth Welsh) are dismissive of Jack's findings until the entire northern hemisphere is attacked by a series of massive storms that literally plunge the world into a new Ice Age in a matter of days. Jack's 17-year-old son Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal) is trapped in New York City; Jack sets out with two colleagues to trek across the newly-treacherous terrain in hopes of finding and rescuing Sam.

While some of the dialogue and situations in the screenplay by Roland Emmerich and Jeffrey Nachmanoff, from Emmerich's story, are comically on the nose, Emmerich as a director has a terrific eye for spectacle. A Tokyo marketplace beset by killing snowfall, hurricane winds stripping the walls from Los Angeles skyscrapers and a tidal wave sweeping over the Statue of Liberty and crashing into the streets of New York are all breathtaking and, thanks to brilliant CGI, remarkably convincing. The family bond stuff is not exactly new ground, but it's a lot more understated than in much of Emmerich's previous work. Quaid and Gyllenhaal give fluid, credible performances and the supporting cast is enriched by the likes of Ian Holm, Adrian Lester, Emmy Rossum, Glenn Plummer and Sela Ward, who all manage to take things seriously without plunging into AIRPLANE!-style self-parody.

Where THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW delivers a bit more than anticipated is in its sweetly earnest point of view about headline issues like the Kyoto Accords and its moments of happy social satire, with glimpses of news footage of U.S. citizens illegally crossing the Rio Grande into Mexico to escape the deadly weather in the north.

As always in this genre, there are some big plausibility stretchers -- having persuaded us for the duration of the film that a climactic disaster of such great magnitude can strike with such speed, the filmmakers then ask us to accept that a closed door can keep out frost that's biting off chunks of buildings -- but by and large, we accept what we're shown. Emmerich keeps the visual and visceral intensity at a powerful pitch almost all the way through -- we may feel that we've been through some version of this a time or two before, but we're engrossed all the same.