eather researcher Jack Hall (Quaid) and his team are looking into the cataclysmic climate changes that ushered in the last ice age 10,000 years ago. But as they drill for ice cores on Antarctica's Larsen B ice shelf, there's an ominous cracking sound. In the nick of time, Hall rescues a team member as a Rhode-Island-sized chunk of the shelf cracks off from the continent, falling away into the sea.
A series of bizarre weather events, meanwhile, takes place around the world: Melon-sized hail falls in Tokyo, a record-breaking hurricane assaults Hawaii, and snow falls in New Delhi, where Hall is attending an international conference on global warming.
Hall warns that melting polar ice could desalinate the oceans, causing a reversal of the Atlantic currents that have kept the northern hemisphere temperate for eons, leading to another ice age. But the U.S. vice president (Kenneth Welsh) will have none of it.
Hall arrives home in Virginia just in time nearly to miss his son Sam (Gyllenhaal), who is headed for New York for an academic decathlon event with the girl he's crushing on, Laura (Rossum), and their friend, Brian (Arjay Smith).
Elsewhere, the ominous climate signs can't be ignored. In Los Angeles, freak tornadoes appear, devastating the city. An emergency meeting is called at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration offices where Hall works. No one can figure it out—that is, until British scientist Terry Rapson (Ian Holm) calls Hall and suggests that his models of the ancient climate change may predict what's happening now.
In New York, meanwhile, the rain has fallen without cease for days. Fearing the worst, Jack calls Sam and tells him to get out and head south. But before Sam and his friends can act, a powerful surge of water heads for the East Side of New York, nearly overrunning the Statue of Liberty, closing in on the city itself.
As chilly as a glacier
The Day After Tomorrow marks helmer Emmerich's return to movies about destruction on a massive scale, the genre that brought him his greatest success (Independence Day) and biggest embarrassment (Godzilla). Emmerich had lately pursued more "serious" projects (a la The Patriot), but was lured back into the fold after reading The Coming of the Global Superstorm, a global-warming jeremiad by UFO apologist Art Bell.
Thus, the movie is filled with earnest good intentions as it sets about gleefully decimating the great cities of the world. But admirable goals don't a rollicking summer movie make, and Day After Tomorrow doesn't weather expectations of an ID:4 redux. For all its eye-popping (if all too brief) visual effects, Day After Tomorrow is as chilly and somber as a glacier.
That earnestness is partly to blame: Unlike ID: 4 or even the much-reviled Godzilla update, Day suffers from an arid lack of humor. There's no character comparable to Will Smith's wisecracking fighter jock from ID: 4, or even Randy Quaid's boozy alien abductee.
Instead, we get another Quaid as a grim "paleoclimatologist" in the predictable role of the lone voice of reason crying in the wilderness. Gyllenhaal is similarly gloomy, though he invests his wafer-thin role with as much inner life as he can. Rossum struggles mightily to sparkle through the deluge, but is overwhelmed by the sheer mechanics of the disaster-movie genre. And the minor characters, around whom the global events turn, aren't developed enough for us to care much about their plights.
The story is wildly implausible, resembling NBC's 10.5 and Paramount's disastrous The Core more than Emmerich's own earlier works, though its initial premise, we are told, is scientifically sound.
