Where are the mice you may ask? Why? The answer is obvious; Roland Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow is high on the cheese quotient and low on pretty much everything else. Still, this is a walk back in time, when films like the Poseidon Adventure, the Towering Inferno, and Earthquake in “Sensurround” were providing mostly cheap thrills to audiences worldwide. Well, there is a certain amount of nostalgia attached to those essentially cardboard attempts to create “entertainment”. The Day after tomorrow is no different.

Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid) is a climatologist, plugging away at the climate in Antarctica, when an enormous chunk of the Antarctic Shelf breaks off, ostensibly due to global warming. Escaping but almost just, we find him giving lectures in Delhi as to the horrors of Global warming. The first signs of this can be seen with snow in Delhi, hail stones in Tokyo and freak weather building up over Los Angeles. It’s all too fast too soon and Hall soon realises that melting polar caps have poured too much fresh water into the oceans and disrupted the currents thereby causing the catastrophic events around the globe, but mainly in the US. But of course, as ever, no one heeds the warning before its too late.

Tornadoes blast L.A and a giant tidal wave engulfs New York, submerging the entire city in water. But a film cannot sustain itself entirely on visuals so we have the sub-plot of father (Quaid) with no time for son Sam, (Jake Gyllenhaal). Son Sam is on a school trip to Manhattan with a group of friends and finds himself trapped in the tidal wave that engulfs Manhattan. Sam and other survivors barricade themselves in New York's Public Library having been told by his father that if he ventures outside, he will die of frost. The reason for this is that the calm after the storm is the onset of a new ice age in the Northern Hemisphere. Jack then sets off from Washington to rescue Sam and the others, not simply to redeem his son but himself for being a negligent father.

Roland Emmerich was responsible for the dreadful but very successful Independence Day. He then set about re-creating Godzilla which was a monstrous movie. The Day After Tomorrow is almost as bad as the previous two but survives because it maintains a certain pace and has some spectacular special effects (and some bordering on the unbelievably bad). Seen as “B” movie, this film offers mindless and untaxing action but absolutely nothing beyond that. Character development is clearly not a strong weapon in Emmerich’s armour.

The film is headed by Dennis Quaid, an actor who saw success with films in the 80s but he is well past his prime. To bring in the younger generation, we have Gyllenhaal playing Sam and clearly, it’s respite for him from his choices in the past, no doubt also money in the bank. It’s sad to have Ian Holm wasted in such a film and a plethora of TV actors further endorses the feeling of a “b” movie. The sermonising on the planet is simply a way of giving a greater meaning to the film but that’s hogwash. The storm comes as fast as it finally dissipates. At the end of the day, it’s supposed to be warning, a lesson for us to wake up to the “disaster” that is waiting to happen. Not a single person seeing the film would believe that but it’s a good way to sell the film! By and large, it’s a fairly tawdry and mundane film which starts off reasonably well as a result of the natural disasters that befall America but soon runs out of steam. It’s enjoyable enough but only if you take it, for what it is a blast from the past!