The Day After Tomorrow

Call me crazy, but there's more going on in The Day After Tomorrow than just standard big-budget hokum. Yes, its climate-change predictions are calculated for maximum disaster movie mayhem, and its story of a scientist (Dennis Quaid) searching for his son (Jake Gyllenhaal) trapped in a New York ice age is thin at best. But there's a delicious end-of-days feel to the whole enterprise, as our bad ecological habits catch up to us and the gods let loose their anger. Indeed, there's a Cheney-esque vice-president who's made to eat his pro-consumption words, and the astonishing sight of evacuated Americans banging on the door of Mexico and being turned back. The guilt of the Western world hangs heavy over this film, and while it isn't smart enough to really explore the concept in depth, you have to respect a film that drives the survivors of the first world screaming into the third. The "all-access special edition" is loaded with extras, beginning with a couple of commentaries on disc one. The first, with director Roland Emmerich and producer Mark Gordon, is generous to the participants but uninformative beyond what things cost; the second, with writer Jeffrey Nachmanoff, the editor, production designer and cinematographer is more involved in the nitty-gritty of aesthetic decisions. Disc two features a joke-y but incoherent "making of" documentary, a more focussed (and more disquieting) documentary on the subject of global warming, two pre-production featurettes (including a prep meeting where nobody can hear anybody else), three post-production featurettes (including an astounding dissection of various digital effects techniques), an interactive audio demo that splits one scene into its various sound elements, ten deleted scenes, storyboard and concept art galleries, and the trailers. (Fox)