The Day After Tomorrow Review

Two things here are worth the ticket: the tornado swarm that takes apart downtown Los Angeles, and the storm surge that walks up the avenues of Manhattan until a cargo ship drifts past a traffic light. Roland Emmerich has always been better at wrecking buildings than at writing the people inside them, and the gap has rarely been this wide.

The physics are nonsense of a specific and very entertaining kind, with a supercooled air mass that flash freezes a helicopter crew in mid sentence and can apparently be outrun on foot down a corridor. Dennis Quaid's paleoclimatologist sets off to walk from Philadelphia to Manhattan in a blizzard, which the film treats as heroic rather than suicidal.

Jake Gyllenhaal and Emmy Rossum do what they can with an academic decathlon romance that exists to give the flood a face, and Ian Holm gets the one scene of real feeling, toasting England from a doomed Scottish research station. Then wolves escape a stranded freighter and stalk the survivors in the New York Public Library, and the last reason to take any of it seriously walks off with them. The effects work still looks superb. Almost nothing on the page does.