..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..R.J. Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

The Day After Tomorrow
Directed by Roland Emmerich

The movie about really, really bad weather, The Day after Tomorrow, is being released by 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment as a Widescreen Edition (2224176, $30). It is not a poor movie, just a really, really stupid one, though as far as that goes, it is no more stupid than a story about a fire-breathing dinosaur coming to life and raising havoc or that sort of thing. The movies thrive on stupidity, and so do DVDs if the special effects and audio mix are there to back them up. One sequence in Tomorrow, where tornadoes trash Los Angeles ("The 'Hollywood' sign is gone, it's just shredded!"), makes a marvelous demonstration piece, especially with the DTS sound whipping cars and billboards around your viewing room. The 5.1-channel Dolby Digital track is fine, but it is the DTS track that really socks it to you, with crisp separations and a playful bass. Meanwhile, the computer animation effects, and there are loads of them, look as crisp and sharp as the scattered images in the movie that were really photographed.

The first part of the movie is constructed mostly from vignettes that one imagines would occur if Fox took over the Weather Channel, which in this case, one supposes, is what did happen. In the second part, Dennis Quaid plays a weather scientist who has had lots of experience walking around in Antarctica and jumping over deep crevasses, so when the time comes for him to walk up the Garden State Parkway in the snow, he's prepared. He has been informed that his son, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, has found refuge in a library in Manhattan, so of course out of the dozens of branches in the New York Public Library system, he knows straight where to go. It isn't hard to find, since there is a huge tanker ship parked outside on Fifth Avenue, or there should be, since several exciting scenes take place there, even though the boat is nowhere to be seen in one of the final long shots of the library later on. Anyway, with all this stuff about the father trying to find his son, and all the crazy special effects involving the weather, the movie is fully entertaining despite its brain frozen science, and if it gets you thinking about what might happen if pollution did start to make the weather go a little cockeyed, then the filmmakers can claim to have raised your consciousness while giving your audio-video system its workout. For me, however, the most frightening line of dialog has nothing to do with the weather. Rather, it is the film's acknowledgement that time has stormed into the future. The young Gyllenhaal runs off, after the power goes out, to make a call, declaring, "Older payphones draw their power directly from the telephone line!" Jeesh, hearing that still gives me chills.

The letterboxing on the Super-35 program has an aspect ratio of about 2.35:1 and an accommodation for enhanced 16:9 playback. The 123-minute presentation has alternate French and Spanish audio tracks in standard stereo, optional English and Spanish subtitles, and a 2-minute segment that lets you break out seven layers of sound effects. There are also two deleted scenes, running a total of 6 minutes, that play better than the blander material they were replaced with, as if the movie wasn't just dumbed down, but numbed down as well.

There are also two commentary tracks, with minor gaps on each track. On one, co-writer Jeffrey Nachmanoff, cinematographer Ueli Steiger, editor David Brenner and production designer Barry Chusid provide a nicely detailed talk, explaining how the effects were accomplished, what the various photographic and editing challenges were, how the sets were designed and then, often, changed, and what inspired various moments in the story. Nachmanoff and Brenner also describe significant changes that went on in the plot and sequences that were removed.

On the other track, director Roland Emmerich and producer Mark Gordon give a more generalized report upon how the various effects were applied and what it was like working with the cast. They also talk about tweaking the pacing of many different scenes, how test audiences responded to different sequences, and what they resisted changing despite pressures from Fox (such as an interracial kiss). Gordon has a habit of reciting dialog, but it keeps the atmosphere lighthearted and never really becomes annoying. Oh, and initially, the final credit scroll ran 13 minutes, until they were able to speed it up to 8 minutes.

October 12 , 2004

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- by Douglas Pratt

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