I don’t know what possessed me to pick up The Day After Tomorrow last night, as it’s certainly not something I would have ever paid to see but since it was a free library movie, I figured why not.
Okay, so had I seen this movie when it came out in 2004, I would have said, “Yeah, right. Come on, people! This shit could NEVER happen.”
And yet now, sitting here as 2005 winds down and leaves in its wake a devastating tsunami, several mind-blowingly horrible earthquakes, an unheard of hurricane season which left a major US city and port in tatters, and a cluster-fuck of an evacuation plan–this movie suddenly became important and eerily real.
Yes, there are many, many stupid parts to this movie–not just the hackneyed young love subplot, and the utterly ridiculous bit with the wolves, and the super-hero climatologist dad who walks from Philadelphia to Manhattan in temperatures that must be close to -40 below, if not colder, but also the fact that these people never really seemed COLD. Growing up in Montreal and upstate New York, I know all about cold and there was never a moment when I thought, “Yeah, those people are cold. I can see it on them.” Cold is me waiting for the school bus when it’s 30 below out. That’s cold. And they never got there despite the fact that a new ice age was upon them.
But I digress.
So what was fascinating about this movie, other than some of the striking similarities to what has gone on in the world in the past eleven months, was that the US government FINALLY decided based on the warnings of the super-hero climatologist to evacuate everyone who lived below a certain line (basically from DC to Northern California). Because the government had not listened to him sooner, it was already too late for everyone above the line (the storm was coming and the cold setting. NYC–where the son was holed up with his scholastic team in the public library–was fucked. Canada was already totally fucked as was much of Northern Europe, etc).
And where were the evacuees meant to go? Mexico. But when they got to the border, Mexico said, “Hell, no! We don’t want you!” (and who can blame them for that?) and so people started freaking out and making their way across the Rio Grande.
Whoa.
Then the US government forgave all Latin American debt and Mexico said, “Okay. Come on in,” and the people of the US set up a huge tent city. This was fascinating and in 2004 I would have said, No way! But now I’m thinking, wow, it’s possible. Well, it would be possible if there were anything like an evacuation plan anywhere in this country.
So I’m not sure that this movie taught me anything, per se, rather it reinforced my fears in regards to global warming and also, most importantly, my fears about what happens when science is stifled by bureaucracy.
It is an eerily prescient film.
myfanwy collins 