Fixin’ to go see a sneak preview.
Anybody know things I should look for? (I’m a member of the Nitpickers Guild.) Has it been reviewed yet? Good or bad? Do you want to hear about it when I come back?
From what I’ve heard, typical Hollywood. Crappy story/Acting, fanstastic special effects.
I’ll be seeing it in about 3 hours so I’ll get back to you.
I caught a screening of it, and I love the movie. I usually try to find things about movies that irritate me, but I was really caught up in everything going on in this one.
I think the director went on record already as admitting that the events in the movie could not take place in the time frame allotted, and were only hurried through for entertianment value. I don’t mind.
Some things I did notice that made me go “hmm?” though:
[spoiler]- Can you really walk from Philadelphia to NYC in the span of 2 or 3 days, in snow, with dozens of pounds of gear, dragging a fat guy behind you for several hours?
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What the hell does an earthquake have to do with weather patterns? I don’t see how snowstorms could’ve really influenced the earthquake.
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Things don’t just magically turn into ice at subzero temperatures. I suppose this is done for purely entertainment value, but throughout the movie, things suddenly turn into ice and creep up on the actors slightly slower than they are moving.
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I guess it was just sheer bad luck that made the wolves miss the hundreds of people walking through the snow and just attack our 3 good guys.
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Cell phone towers, IIRC, are run off of power lines. No power = no cell tower = no cell phone.[/spoiler]
That’s all I can think of right now. 
Considering the movie comes from the guy who gave us Independence Day, I’m surprised it’s this coherent.
It’s already a spoiler thread, no need for boxes.
That was no earthquake. That was the building being shaken apart by the tornado. Trust me, I’ve been in a couple, and they came pretty darn close to what I imagine an F4/F5 might feel like in a high rise.
As to the rest of the show…
Well, it had some good parts. I liked the resourcefulness and mutual trust of the kids. I liked the relationship between the Dad and his family and workers.
The cliches of the government not listening to the scientists is a staple of this movie genre, so nothing much to say there.
As to the actual science, I think they let their own beliefs/wishes/conceptions about things influence the scenario. It wouldn’t happen like that. Our research into the past has shown us that change, outside of some external event, doesn’t happen so quickly. But that wouldn’t make an exciting movie, now would it?
Plus, where were all the weather satelites? Why did they have to rely on the space station?
Like I said, I’m a nitpicker. And this movie maker seems to have some sort of agenda biting his ass.
Overall, it was entertaining. I give it a B-.
Well, NoClueBoy, if you think the movie rates a B, even a B-, maybe I’ll give it a whirl. Sometimes the science isn’t the most important thing, it’s “if it was happening like that, how would people really act?”
And at the risk of being derided, I’ll say I liked “Independence Day”
Just saw it tonight. Overall, a C (A+ for effects, D- for plot/story), IMO.
I really liked it when L.A. got socked! (But then again, I’m from NYC. Hehe.)
But seriously… the NYC tidal wave was awesome too. Very few of the snow/freezing effects wowed me, however, and the wolves looked downright phoney.
To close with a nitpicky comment: There is no need to burn the books in the NYPL. First, paper makes crappy fuel. Second, the place contains tons of wood – tables, chairs and shelves – that burns better and longer.
A reporter from the NY Times complained that when he saw it, he felt no compassion for the hundreds of millions of people being killed. Was this true as well for those of you who saw it?
I think it looks like the entire thing is about effects and the characters (i.e. people) are only there to add dialogue. That kinda annoys me, so there is little chance we’ll see it in the theatre even if it looks really neat.
Maybe a renter, but I still won’t keep my hopes up.
Well, they’re all kinda wiped out off camera, so it’s tough to feel for them. Watching NY get trashed was kind of strange.
A worthy point. The movie totally avoided shots and references to the mass carnage that had to be occurring just about everywhere on the northern hemisphere. Every once and a while I found myself considering this and saying to myself, “Gee, this movie is sidestepping a pretty big aspect of the plot here.” Then I’d deduct points in my head. And because I could not give a crap about any of the main characters – they were all so blah, especially the mom – I would agree that the movie was essentially compassionless.
I think they tried to give you a flavor for the mass deaths by showing the band of library survivors that attempted to flee south on foot but were frozen to death. But it wasn’t near enough to make the point. I mean the NYC metro area contains 8 to 10 million people. There would be corpses, survivors and the injured everywhere.
I saw it tonight. Was good enough filler to hold the boffo special effects together. I didn’t really care about the Dad’s storyline, and the Mom/doctor/cancer patient thing was just a waste of space. And they never went anywhere with the president side of the story. He died, the VP replaced him, and admitted he was wrong. Big whoop.
It is truly amazing how far the effects have come. Photoreal tidal waves thru NYC, completely computer rendered, with fake buildings, fake people, and fake buses being washed away. Who needs models anymore? And the whole opening flyover is CG, and the whole first Antarctica scene was done with inserted backgrounds.
An obvious nitpick is that the tidal wave should have knocked over the Statue of Liberty. The director says in EW this week that he felt that was a little inappropriate for NYC after 9/11.
Found a link for you nitpickers.
I saw the movie tonight and I quite liked it. The effects were definitely awesome, though the plot had many weak points (ones that you people have already mentioned). I especially noticed the lack of dead people when we got the underwater view, as the ship was going past the library - I would think with all those people, there’d be corpses floating around everywhere. But I liked the movie (I’m not particularly fond of seeing corpses floating around anyway). I wouldn’t have wanted to wait to rent this one, since the effects looked so awesome in the theatre.
Maybe this sounds a bit sick, but I wish they’d shown more international landmarks being destroyed. :dubious: Okay, that definitely sounds sick. I just think it would’ve been cool to see what they could’ve done with say, the Colosseum, the Eiffel Tower, stuff like that. Definitely a film targeted to an American audience.
I also liked the points it made about how humans are exploiting the environment’s natural resources. After the movie, I went to the bathroom, and I actually used the automatic hand-dryers instead of paper towels! 
The guys on the space station were kind of annoying, especially at the end when one said “Look how clear the air is!”
Well, I guess it’s okay if four billion people die, if the air gets better.
The preachy sanctimony was obvious and I expect it will convince none but the stupidest viewers. Anyone who says the Bush Administration is or should be concerned about the impact of this movie is a serious doof.
The closing of the Mexico border was worth a chuckle, but in reality the Texas National Guard would just roll in with tanks and take over.
Hell, the citizens of Texas are better armed than Mexico!
The preachyness* I overlooked for the sake of enjoyment, which is what I meant by the movie makers having an agenda biting their ass.
BTW, using the electric hand dryer causes more environmental damage.**
*not just about environment, they were preachy about relations with third world nations, too.
**no site, I’m just joking, I don’t realy know.
Everything I wanted to say about this movie has already been said.
Definitely aimed at an American audience, visual effects spectacular but the characters lacked depth and the performances of the leading actors were below par. This movie did not stir the emotions at all and I am normally easily moved. The speech at the end was the final straw for me in this movie, totally unnecessary.
This is what Mr. Cranky from “Red Eye” News paper here in Chicago had to say about it! http://www.mrcranky.com/movies/dayaftertomorrow.html
And yet they didn’t give us a single frozen canuck-sicle to giggle at.
Cliche central. They were piled on top of each other clamouring for attention.
Why the hell should we care if some annoyingly goody-good family should survive, but not care about the news reporter who gets slammed by a flying billboard? Why should we be worried if the son will drown while making a phone call when it’s screamingly obvious he’s going to survive till the end? Why should we care if the girl has septicaemia, of all things, when we know she also is the only other one of the group clearly marked as a survivor to the end?
What I wished it was about was a long, realistic (within reason) oncoming ice age, economically shown in the first half hour, and then the rest of the movie showed what life would be like struggling to survive in the aftermath, perhaps after a period of five or ten years had passed.
Instead it’s a bog-standard disaster movie.
Indeed, it was just like Indepndence Day and Godzilla, but with less giant lizards and aliens, and more snow.
Nicely put.
I was put in mind of the President’s speech at the end of Independence Day, where he’s talkin’ about our independence and we will not go quietly into extinction, and blah blah blah.
I remember feeling two things – “Wow, what an uninspiring speech,” and “Wow, I’m supposed to feel inspired right now, so I’ll pretend, so’s I don’t spoil the movie.”
I felt this way through much of Day After Tomorrow. I mean, if they hadn’t tried to EXPLAIN why the weather was going berserk, and why the megafreezewave was turning people into popsicles in seconds, I think I would have liked it better. As it was, I spent way too much of the movie going “Huh? That couldn’t happen. How the hell could THAT work?”
As it was, I found that I didn’t much care about most of the people (except Ian Holm, for some reason… maybe because he was Bilbo), and the teen relationships were downright embarrassing.
Oh, and does anyone remember the famous dog-escapes-explosion-in-tunnel scene from Independence Day? Apparently, someone does in my locality. One wag elsewhere in the theatre, during the tidal wave in Manhattan, cried, “Quick, turn down a side street!”
Ultimately, I think the most memorable thing about the movie was the jackass sitting behind me with the cell phone that played the Exorcist theme who accepted TWO calls during the show, and only put it the hell away when I turned around and said, “Excuse me, I PAID to see this movie, bud.”
I swear, one of these days, you people are going to be reading about me on Yahoo News in the Oddly Enough section… “man goes berserk during movie, dismembers guy with cell phone…”