by Roger Bourke White, Jr. June 2004
In technofiction terms, the Day after Tomorrow (Tomorrow) is one of those "Where's Waldo" kind of movies -- a movie with so much technically wrong with it that it's really tough to keep score. In the case of Tomorrow, not only is the science bad, the actions taken by the protagonists are equally bizarre.
The operative word for this movie is "preposterous", now lets get to some detail....
...as I write this, I realize that there are so many problem details that I'll treat them as categories rather than individual incidents.
The 90's and 00's have been a renaissance decade for cliffhangers. This form was big in early silent movies, then mercifully was laid somewhat to rest as a terrible cliché in the 40's through the 80's, but it's back in full force -- I suspect because the new cameras and new special effects make it easy to portray again.
Cliffhanging is Hollywood's most annoying cliché to me. And that's partly because all Hollywood cliffhangers violate several physical laws. Most notably, the laws of strength of humans. This movie is mainstream in its pedantic handling of cliffhangers.
This movie doesn't show casualties. It shows city buildings succumbing to weather, but there's very little footage about people, suburban or rural buildings, or secondary effects. There's no looting shown, no banditry, no gangs wandering the country side, no people with shattered lives, no factories that can no longer produce.
What it shows instead are the silly stories of panic-induced actions. (more on this later)
Throughout history, entertainers have always violated space and time constraints to tell a story, so this is nothing new, and it's not a problem in and of itself. I see a problem when the entertainer lies about the story stretching space and time -- when the entertainer says, "What I'm about to show you is true.", as in a historic drama such as the movie JFK, or "What I'm about to show you is logically consistent." such as in a science fiction film. Examples of movies with pretty good logical consistencies are: the first and second Matrix movies (not the third), and the first Lord of the Rings movie.
All, I repeat ALL the supposed science in this movie violates space and time constraints and is logically inconsistent. Lets make a list:
That's my short list of time and space problems. Lets move on.
The one thing that makes me cringe harder than violations of space and time in a movie is violations of "good conduct" by the characters -- by good conduct I mean logically consistent conduct. This movie is full of violations.
First let me note that all disaster movies are all first class examples of Panic Thinking (see my article on how the mind works) Thus, the prime motivation of major characters in all disaster movies is Panic Thinking. For some reason there's a large class of people (the Disaster Movie watchers) who really get off on watching stories of people making silly pledges in times of stress (and in the 90's and 00's those pledges are always made to make amends for bonding rituals that were overlooked in pre-stress times), and then doing silly things to live up to those pledges.
This business of making silly pledges and watching them be fulfilled seems to be the core entertainment feature of all disaster movies.
That said, here is my list of silly motivations and actions.
By comparison, the teenagers trapped in NYC are paragons of rationality. They do what seems to be right given the information they have and they don't go around making silly pledges.
Finally, as I mentioned earlier. There's so little about things happening outside the big cities. It's a big, diverse world we live in, but this movie acts as if cities are the whole world.
So, by technofiction standard, this disaster movie is a disaster.
The End
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