Well, Netflix sent me The Day After Tomorrow, so last night while Mrs. R was out with her friends, I sat down to watch it.
It was darned amusing. When Mrs. R got home and came into the TV room, I told her that I was watching a movie about a new Ice Age that took place in a world similar to our own in which science worked in strange ways and where people were constrained to speak, without rolling their eyes, words that sounded like they came from a third-rate screenwriter.
(Oh, and the CGI timber wolves were perfectly awful.)
I do have to admit that I’d never seen a cargo ship sailing down a Manhattan street before.
Poor Dennis Quaid. I bet he’s still wondering what happened to his career.
Missed the edit window, but was going to say that tDaT had some fine small performances… I’m thinking of the three men left in the observation station - Ian Holm and Adrian Lester and the other guy – knowing that the end was coming and they couldn’t escape. I also liked the kid who played Jake Gyllenhall’s friend.
Also, Dennis Quaid followed up this movie with the very well received In Good Company, so he’s fine. He’s also a major DILF.
I’m a big fan of this movie. I think it gets an undeserved bad rap. If someone didn’t find the movie exciting, or thought the performances were poor, then fine, those are valid criticisms. But to complain about the scientific accuracy is to miss the point completely. It’s like saying you didn’t enjoy Cloverfield because there’s no such animal as the Cloverfield monster.
I actually enjoyed it. It was well paced, had an interesting premise, and, as lisacurl pointed out, had some fine acting. And it wasn’t boring–so many really bad movies are boring. I also enjoyed The Core, which a lot of people detest, and I think the two movies have a lot in common–mostly an old-style pulp sci-fi approach to their subject matter. Oh, and scenes of birds going nuts.
But the dialog was really cringe-worthy in places, and of course the science was so much hand-waving–so I feel I can make fun of those aspects.
Not so. The Cloverfield movie was a fantasy about an attack by a big monster. Therefore you must accept the existence of big monsters from the beginning, something easily done for a fantasy film.
However, as we (most of us) already accept that there is such a thing as climate change, and it fits within certain existing popularly recognisable scientific principles, a little exaggeration may be allowable, but blatantly showing scientifically implausible (and physically impossible) things just takes you out of the movie. It does not present itself as a fantasy film but as a “What If…” adventure, and playing fast and loose with science doesn’t cut it in that circumstance.
I definitely. Part of the fun is to see the geographic errors. My favorite:
[ul]
[li]When the tsunami hits New York, Brooklyn and Long Island don’t exist. They would have born the brunt of the wave – the entrance to New York harbor is narrow and opens to the sea in a southeast direction. [/li][li]From the angle of the wave when it inundates Manhattan, it would have had to have originated in inland New Jersey.[/li][li]The storm, coming from the north, freezes the Empire State Building (34th Street) before reaching the library (42nd Street).[/li][/ul]
But the movie is entertaining even in the silliness. Complaining about the science is like complaining about the science in The Core – they don’t care that they’re inaccurate, just that they tell a good story.
I love this movie. FX or SciFi (one of those odd channels) plays it a lot. The tornadoes over LA are pretty badly done, but the rapid freezing stuff is pretty cool. There’s more disaster than soap, unlike so many other apocalypse movies.
Over the top, but fun. Emily Rossum is yummy. Having the International Space Station crew look down into the jaws of Hell, er, that massive storm, was 'way cool. And it was a nice touch to have the U.S. instantly forgive Mexico’s foreign debt just to permit a massive migration southwards.
I’ll agree (to a point) that the bad science is somewhat irrelevant to the success of the movie.
What makes the movie truly awful is the ham-fisted “lessons” it keeps foisting over the storyline. I’m no fan of the current administration, but the lecturing tone regarding neo-con shortsightedness on the environment was an eye-rolling embarassment (was that actor cast merely because he looked like Dick Cheney? It certainly wasn’t for his acting chops). Ditto bits like Mexico trying to stop American illegals from crossing the border (Haw-haw! What irony!) and the silly “debate” about which books to burn for warmth.
It was based on a book by Art Bell and Whitley Strieber so it must be scientifically accurate.
I enjoy the movie up to a point. And that point is the fucking wolves. It is a movie about the end of the world and global disaster and someone thought they had to punch it up with wolves running through New York. How about showing some more destruction or maybe some plot. Wait, strike that last part. No plot needed.
