The Day After Tomorrow

Wednesday's USA Today covered the political tussles swirling about the impending release of The Day After Tomorrow, the utterly-implausible environmental catastrophe movie. The article pretty readily concedes the impossibilty of what the movie depicts, an onslaught of disaster that unfolds over the course of days rather than decades. This is something that my friends and I were poking fun at weeks ago; specifically: how does one create movie terror from the onset of an ice age?

Say you have your basic glacier. It moves maybe a few inches an hour when it's really hauling ass. You can put a crowd of movie extras in front of the glacier, screaming their heads off, but in less than a minute all the extras are going to realize the glacier isn't doing anything and will switch to casually discussing lunch plans.

So apparently the movie creators figured the only way to make the film compelling was to make everything a thousand to ten thousand times faster. With that kind of license I could write a horror/disaster script about almost anything. Rust, for example. Only most of the moviegoing public will know, "The whole pretense of that new Rust movie is utterly absurd. Why should I waste my time?" I could point out to them that my special effects showing whole cities corroding and falling down are really compelling, but I still don't think they'd pay to see my movie. And yet I'm sure that folks by the millions are going to plunk down eight bucks each for The Day After Tomorrow, and come out mumbling, "I had no idea that stuff could happen!" Barnum loved such people.