Today... A New Direction, Movie Reviewing.
I haven't tried to do this before, so I may not get the tone right - I understand from the mastery that is pax_draconis that one needs a subtle blend of fulsome description and keen judgement, spiced with references to classics of the genre as benchmarks, and perhaps with a frisson of admiration for the acting abilities (or at least physical attributes) of the cast.
So, on to "The Day After Tomorrow".
This is the worst movie I have ever seen in the cinema.
I admit that I never saw "Plan 9 from Outer Space" or "Saturn 3" in theatre, so there is some wiggle-room, but good Christ, that was the most execrable insult to filmmaking it has been my burden to sit through. It's like someone opened the Big Boys' Bumper Book of 70s Disaster Movie Clichés and tried to shove them all in one picture with a script so stilted it could have been written by George Lucas, and then hoped you could make it watchable by adding a nine-figure special effects budget.
Nope. You can't.
Dennis Quaid is a better actor than his lines give him credit, but his Harrison-Ford-as-Indiana-Jones impression is... not as good as the original. Note that I make no quality judgements on Indy, I'm just saying that Dennis was not as good.
Ian Holm must be running out of money. I forgave him for Bilbo. I quite liked the Fifth Elephant. But this mierda...dew neh loh moh on that, man. Get something with a script, any script, written by someone who got through high school. I'm not asking for Hemingway, I don't expect Hitchcock or Huston or Coppola, but this crass two-dimensional rehash of a dozen better (yet still bad) films is way short of the mark.
But it has everything you've seen before, in Earthquake and The Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure and Airport (all of them) and oh God I can't take it anymore... Someone said on a TV show I was watching recently that scriptwriters do all right with the things they know, but where the story goes outside their personal experience, they reach for something comforting, like another film that did that sort of thing - maybe even well, but in the plagiarism it invariably turns to a sort of gooey mush that looks like echinacea powder you put in a wheatgrass health shake, and which tastes about as nasty as you'd guess it does.
A quick stab at the list...
- the troubled expert who knows the problem but Cassandra-like is ignored
- and is estranged from his wife because of his work
- and their son is in the danger zone
- but she (a doctor) stays on to look after the little kid recovering from chemo.
- the buddy who says "I've never let you go anywhere on your own before" - no way he's going to live, he might as well have shown a picture of his wife and kids to the other guy in the foxhole and said "I'm going home in three days" in a Nam flick.
- the rich kid survives because the homeless black man teaches him about life on the streets
- the awful awful speechifying about climate change (doesn't matter what you think of global warming, I *guarantee* you'll think you cannot a) know less than the scriptwriters, and b) write worse dialogue
- the couple who canoodle die because you can't have sex and live in disaster movies any more than you can at Camp Crystal Lake
- the reporters who tragically don't notice that in the middle of four tornados is a bad place to be.
- never go back for your purse
My favourite bit is when a hapless Tokyo sarariman is killed by falling ice - and they want pathos, so the next shot is a close up of his hand, with his wife's voice coming out of his cellphone - nice and clear so you can see the Panasonic logo. This is a movie that's good for product placement. Having said that, it's so dire that the burger joint the rescuers take shelter in is a Wendy's - my bet is that McD felt this film was so bad it would shame even them to be associated with it.
My next favourite bit is that the Vice-President is chosen to look so much like Dick Cheney.
I was all fired up to slag this off properly, but I've run out of steam, thanks to my good friend, le Baron de Sigognac, may he be carried to heaven on the wings of angels when his time comes, for providing this wonderful stuff that is profaned to be addressed as "brandy".
For heaven's sake don't see it.
There you go, that wasn't so bad for a first effort, was it?