The Day After Tomorrow

Emmerich knows his stuff. With compelling visuals, likeable characters, a few tornadoes and a tidal wave, he manages to deliver so much sincere cinematic fun that you can't be mad at how childish it is. As far as entertainment value goes, The Day After Tomorrow isn't bad, everything looks great, it oozes the requisite dose of fatality, and the two hours pass by in a flurry of tried-and-true genre clichés, with Emmerich-esque gems that fly by faster than you can say frost. Compared to that, the story is abysmal. Once again, the heart of it all is the standard epicentre of Hollywood – Manhattan, with the situation elsewhere in the world only vaguely referred to through a newscast –, dumb people running away from huge torrents of water or getting a freezing door slammed in the faces if they're not interesting. If you only want to have fun, you will be able to overlook these "small details", but I have to stick with 3*, if only because I gave four to the much more entertaining and wholesome 2012. 65% (30/11/2015)

Roland Emmerich once again demonstrates how excellent he is at making relaxing movies. His "The Day After Tomorrow" is exactly that. You want to watch it when there's nothing else on TV, you want to talk about it even though your significant other devours every scene. Unfortunately, I paid too much attention to the inconsistencies and I could only marvel at the nonsense that Hollywood mainstream feeds us. It's sometimes truly laughable. But hey, this is supposed to be entertainment, and at times I actually laughed quite a bit. (09/01/2014)

Leaving aside the obvious fact that the processes of flow change and cooling that Emmerich describes in this film are long-term and span many decades (OK, exaggeration, I'll take it), the rest of the story is the essence of everything that is wrong with contemporary Hollywood: the tired clichés, the boring to tedious predictability of everything that happens on screen, the shoddy psychology of the cookie-cutter characters on the level of a literary attempts of a ten-year-old. The result is an unhealthy toying with the intelligence and tolerance of the normally thinking viewer. EMMERICH, GET OUT!!!! PS: To rate a film with a few stars just because it has great visual effects seems misguided to me. Nowadays, good special effects are par for the course, not an exception. (03/12/2005)

On a second viewing, it's just a little bit better. Roland Emmerich toned it down with pathos, he doesn't always hit the mark, but he can win over the audience. The climate action boasts fantastic visual effects and thrilling action sequences. Unfortunately, there isn't as much of it as in his previous films, and especially the second half can bring a feeling of boredom, mainly due to a weak screenplay and a flood of clichés that unpleasantly stick to the very likeable heroes. (10/09/2004)

The first half of The Day After Tomorrow is pleasing but in no way surprising. We’ve already seen everything in the trailer. And the second half is just boredom stacked on top of boredom. It’s not Roland Emmerich’s dumbest sci-fi movie, but it is his least entertaining. Whereas Stargate and Independence Day were the sincere playthings of an admitted man-child, The Day After Tomorrow is a drama with pretensions of being serious by a mediocre filmmaker trying to do great things. (26/05/2004)