Jump to content
GreaseSpot Cafe

The Day After Tomorrow


Recommended Posts

Suuuuuucked!

Yeah the special effects were somewhat entertaining (big surprise) but all else about the movie was pretty lame.

A new ice age is coming, but that darn, wily Dick Cheney-looking vice-president won't take seriously the warnings of a scientist (Dennis Quaid) whose son (still in high school) looks only 10 years younger than his mother (Sela Ward). The characters themselves are freakin' unbelievable.

Run, don't walk, AWAY from the theater on this one. If you need a fix of special effects, save some money and rent a video game, or wait until it comes out on tape.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Agreed. There wasn't anything else we haven't seen worth watching so we went ahead to see this one.

I loudly cursed the people who made the movie during the wolf chase scene, as I take that rather personally when movies show wolves as evil monsters.

The president and vice president were interesting, in that the president looked like Al Gore, and the VP Cheney. That was very odd. Also I was suprised that an ecological propaganda movie came out from Fox, since Rupert Murdoch is not exactly known for standing against conservative morals.

The most original thing is probably that a freeze can chase you down a hallway. It was like Jurrasic Park, but instead of velociraptors, it was icesickles.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

quote:
Originally posted by Tom Strange:

I thought the previews looked a little lame... so instead of prompting me to go to see the movie... it reminded me I didn't have a copy of 'Independence Day'... so I got that instead!


I will post something about this on the Open forum where we were talking about the aliens and such.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I haven't seen this one yet, but I'm thinking about it.

When I saw the first few trailers on TV, I was struck by a line where they said something like, "it's been 10,000 years since something like this happened." I thought, "Cool, it's about the true power of nature, and not about global warming. I'll go see it."

But then I heard that it IS about global warming, and decided against.

Now, I'm thinking about watching it and drawing comparisons between "Day After Tomorrow" and first century Jewish apocalyses, analyzing the movie as a 21st century ecological apocalyptic. But it's not at the top of my priority list.

Love,

Steve

Link to comment
Share on other sites

quote:
Originally posted by Steve Lortz:

Now, I'm thinking about watching it and drawing comparisons between "Day After Tomorrow" and first century Jewish apocalyses, analyzing the movie as a 21st century ecological apocalyptic. But it's not at the top of my priority list.

Love,

Steve


That sounds like an interesting project, Steve.

It seems that for awhile, there were numerous movies about meteors and comets slamming into the earth as well (i.e., "Sudden Impact", "Armegeddon"). It may be worth revisiting a few classics as well, like "When Worlds Collide", except in those type of scenarios, mankind didn't necessarily do anything to have incurred an ecological "wrath from heaven"...actually, when I think about, such movies of mankind dealing with their ecological "sins" seemed plentiful in the 70s, ("Day of the Animals") though even the classic "Godzilla" and "The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms" (and other gargantuous creatures thereafter) during the 50s trace their unleashing to the testing of atomic bombs.

BTW, the original 1953 Japanese version of "Godzilla" (without Raymond Burr, with about 40 extra minutes of footage) is being shown in American theaters this summer. That's a flick I would love to see. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were still fresh in the minds of the Japanese at that time. The story was also partly inspired by radiation sickness having occurred among the Japanese crew of the fishing trawler, "The Lucky Dragon", which strayed through the waters of the Bikini Islands where Americans had been testing hydrogen bombs.

Danny

Link to comment
Share on other sites

quote:
Originally posted by TheInvisibleDan:

BTW, the original 1953 Japanese version of "Godzilla" (without Raymond Burr, with about 40 extra minutes of footage) is being shown in American theaters this summer. That's a flick I would love to see. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were still fresh in the minds of the Japanese at that time. The story was also partly inspired by radiation sickness having occurred among the Japanese crew of the fishing trawler, "The Lucky Dragon", which strayed through the waters of the Bikini Islands where Americans had been testing hydrogen bombs.


I have the DVD. icon_biggrin.gif:D-->

Link to comment
Share on other sites

quote:
Originally posted by Steve Lortz:

When I saw the first few trailers on TV, I was struck by a line where they said something like, "it's been 10,000 years since something like this happened." I thought, "Cool, it's about the true power of nature, and not about global warming. I'll go see it."

But then I heard that it IS about global warming, and decided against.


Ummm...I thought global warming is a certified fact, while the cause of it is what is up for debate? I could be wrong as I haven't really looked into it that much, but I'm pretty sure that it is really happening, and that the science behind melting glaciers screwing up the ocean and weather are sound. The movie isn't really based on science, but global warming is real, even if most people misrepresent it.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

quote:
Originally posted by Mister P-Mosh:

quote:
Originally posted by TheInvisibleDan:

I distinctly recall suppressing the overwhelming urge to throw my popcorn and empty drink cup at the screen toward the end of the movie. Not good. Not good at all.


Which scene? The ice chase?


No, at the ecologically repentant Dick Cheney, waxing fuzzy about how the 3rd world countries have now taken us in as refugees...yeah right!

The real Dick Cheney most surely would have militarily conquered Mexico first, and then move right into the presidential palace, rather than living in a freakin' tent. And why the heck did the Bush-Gore lookalike president hang out in Washington so long, packing his things with the movers? I would think he would have been the first at the presidential palace in Mexico (if not at least as far as Texas, away from the oncoming "Ice-a-raptors"), ahead of Cheney.

You have a copy of the original "Gojira"?

Cool! Unfortunately I only have the Americanized Raymond Burr version. Can't wait to see the original.

Danny

Link to comment
Share on other sites

quote:
Originally posted by Zixar:

P-Mosh: It isn't. Penn & Teller devoted one of the episodes of P&T:BS! to Environmental Hysteria and hit the global warming myth pretty hard. It's on the Season 1 DVD, available now.


I've seen plenty of data on the tempuratures rising, so I'd side with PBS over Penn and Teller on that one, however I do agree that the question is still out on example what is causing it.

graph2.gif

This indicates that there has definitely been a warming trend in recent history, although it doesn't attempt to explain it. In fact, there has been evidence that the carbon dioxide levels have gone up in the past as they are now, which accompanied warming trends:

graph4.gif

As you can see there though, it appears to happen in cycles, even though our current upswing is a bit higher than previously. It's not a huge difference, only about 40 ppm between the previous peaks.

The graphs from PBS are here in case they don't show up in my post.

In any case, it looks like the warming trend is real, and I don't see how it could be spun differently. They use pretty sound science as far as I can tell to identify the warming. It's just that the idiots who say things like, "If two people drive seperately to work it's going to kill Gaia" distort the science.

I'd be interested in hearing Penn & Teller's side of it though.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Look at that temperature graph again. The extreme is only half a degree Celsius. Since Galileo invented the thermometer in 1593 (and it didn't come into widespread use until Fahrenheit invented the mercury thermometer in the early 1700s), two-thirds of that graph is little more than conjecture. Even though based on some scientific measurement of some sort, I'm sure, nothing short of physical thermometer readings could possibly be that accurate over the span of +/- half a degree.

Penn & Teller demonstrated that today's environmental lobby has been co-opted for political purposes rather than scientific ones. They interviewed one of the founders of Greenpeace who has severed ties with them because of their move away from conservation and towards politics, as well as Dr. Bjorn Lomborg, another Greenpeace member who wrote a telling book called The Skeptical Environmentalist. The upshot is that the data that so much of the global-warming hysteria is based on is not at all conclusive. In the 70s, scientists looking at the same data concluded we were headed towards another Ice Age!

Greenpeace and most other "green" organizations are no longer crusaders for nature so much as they are anti-corporate/ anti-globalization/ anti-government fanatics. P&T point out that there's nothing inherently wrong with being anti-government or anti-big-business--they are, themselves--but to use environmental BS as some sort of "scientific" basis for that stance is fotally tucked. They went to an Earth rally in Washington DC and got hundreds of people to sign a petition to ban dihydrogen monoxide (water), after telling them it's used in nuclear power plants and plastics manufacture and how it was now being found in large quantities in our lakes and rivers! They pointed out that while the environment is everyone's concern, the vast majority of the people at the rally were upper-middle-class whites, more concerned with joining a crowd instead of rational examination of what they were rallying for. They showed many shots of posters condemning Exxon, Mobil, and the government, yet when the producers asked for a chosen spokesperson from one of the sponsoring groups, the person they put up was completely clueless on the environment, as was another spokesperson for one of the "wildlife funds" spouting off how thousands of species are going extinct every year--despite there being NO scientific evidence to support that claim.

Ridiculous. As for the CO2 levels, the Earth beats us all hollow for generating its own CO2. Note how the big swings go back thousands of years, but the industrial age has only been around for about 200--hardly catastrophic. Remember also the big flap about chlorofluorocarbons destroying the ozone layer? Turns out that mankind may not really be to blame for that one after all. When Mount Pinatubo erupted several years ago, it blew more CFCs into the atmosphere in one shot than the entire population's hairspray and air conditioners did in a year, and Pinatubo wasn't even an unusually large volcano. Since volcanoes have been erupting since the dawn of the planet, and since they've had billions of years to completely destroy the ozone if it was going to happen, it looks like Man's contribution of CFCs wasn't even a drop in the proverbial bucket.

Most of this stuff can also be influenced by the fact that our Sun is a slightly-variable star. It fluctuates over an eleven-year cycle, but it's not exactly uniform. 1998 was the warmest year on record, but a) we haven't been keeping records all that long, and, b) that was six years ago--temperatures have been dropping since.

There's just not enough real, hard data to make a conclusion one way or the other. But that doesn't stop the wackos from proclaiming gloom and doom is nigh. The key is to make sure you've got a solid foundation before you start jumping up and down.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

And to add to what Zixar said:

When temperature records first started being kept, there were far fewer measurements taken - that is, instead of, say, 20 or 30 measurements per city, there was 1 measurement per large city, and none at all for smaller locations.

So conservatively speaking, we are taking 20 to 30 times as many measurements as were taken back in the late 1800's.

That in itself would cause over a half of a degree of fluctuation.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I saw this movie this week. Once you get past the opening disasters that they show in the previews it's downhill from there. It's about as good as a made for TV movie. So wait for it to be on TV. I think the old disaster films like "Eartquake" and "The Towering Inferno" were better. Maybe if George Kennedy and Charlton Heston were in there it would have been a better film.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 months later...

The speed at which everything happened was pretty far fetched and poor old NYC gets it in the neck yet again.

I thought the fuinniest scene was all the americans fleeing across the Rio Grande and being refused entrance at the borders.

I get the Mexicans thought that the best scene too! icon_biggrin.gif:D-->

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 4 weeks later...
  • 1 month later...

I had to wait for the dvd to come out -- and even then it took me two days to watch it (I can't take so much peril terror).

Hope for the new world: Dennis Quaid made a promise to his son and kept it! And son said, "He'll be here."

I thought that was cool.

I liked looking at the ordinary things in a different way -- things under ice.

Emmerich is from UC Berkeley, home of Lawrence radiation lab and Hall of Science,and much academic intellecualism. I got a kick out of seeing the hypothesis that the intellectuals were the only ones with Good Sense played out.

Unfortunately the only satisfying resolution of the great problems in life are found in the heart of the Lord -- which place is not journeyed to in this movie.

The one reference to prayer in the pinch was by Dennis Quaid's character,and it was said without too much conviction.

I did like seeing what a man like Kerry would be in a calamity -- TDAT U.S. President saved himself and made a mealy speech about preserving our resources. No mention of beseeching God's favor and deliverance. Just brain power saved the day.

Oh well. Some think this I am sure. And those that think our salvation lies in the intelligence of our youth will find satisfaction in this movie.

Kit

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 4 weeks later...

quote:
I got a kick out of seeing the hypothesis that the intellectuals were the only ones with Good Sense played out.
You forgot Hollywood's token, homeless black guy, who diagnosed the problem before anybody else knew there was one. "They be messin' wit da weather, pollutin' an' such." (Paraphrased.)

I just rented the DVD. I'm not even gonna bother ripping it (heh heh). It's like a teen scare'em movie, but much less "believable." Each scene is worse than the last. The acting is competing with the direction, each trying to be lousier than the other.

I remember the reviews being fairly positive on this one. It must be the global warming message that got on their good side. Whadda stinker! Not even worth renting, although the special effects are pretty cool.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I didn't even see that. (Wasn't watching very closely)

Also, I guess it helps to be from Berkeley CA, home of the intellectual grafitti.

I think you need to be able to laugh at it.

Also I think it was good to put so much of the comforts we take for granted in the perspective of "essential" for life.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

 Share

×
×
  • Create New...