Dave... at the movies

I don't usually go to the movies but it happens from time to time as it did last night. Sarah announced that she was going out to see the new Harry Potter flick with the boys. I wasn't interested (I still haven't watched Potter #2) and neither was Adam. A few minutes after they left I went to my office, poked around online and asked Adam if he wanted to go see The Day After Tomorrow. He did. We went.

I'm glad that I hadn't seen anything beyond the previews on television. As it was I thought New York City was covered in sand after some sort of cataclysmic event. A lot of people aren't going to like the rather overt politics in a movie that wasn't too smart to begin with. But what the heck, it's just a movie. Ultimately it's a special effects flick about weather gone mad with a bunch pointless of people tossed in to try to make a story. Unlike Independence Day, the story didn't do anything to make me care about it (ID4's strength for me was that it was so over the top, it made fun of itself and allowed you to laugh at it and with it at the same time).

The whole reason to go see a film like this is the special effects. There are three main groups and they are rather dazzling.

There are lots of great earth from space shots. If you're the type who downloads 80 meg TIFFs of space images and spends time looking at them for detail, you'll be able to appreciate that part of the film. I did anyway.

Then there's the section which can be summed up as super Twister meets Los Angeles. That means about five minutes of let's rip LA to shreds with something different, in this case, some seriously large tornados that attack the city more or less all at once. They hit most of the usual suspects, the sign, downtown, the beaches (they did seem to miss having fun doing a piano effect on the Santa Monica Pier though). There was one shot I'm not familiar with. Early in the LA sequence they show a helicopter flying south, with downtown to the left over what might have been Sepulveda Pass (there is clearly a freeway below which could be the 405) but the perspective didn't quite look right. If this wasn't shot (or CGI'd) there, perhaps it was over the Hollywood Pass (there is a subsequent shot of the sign being eaten). If you know the answer, please do tell.

And finally, the real point of the film is to turn New York City into a popsicle. You make a popsicle by adding liquid and then freezing, and that's more or less what's done; with lots of running screaming people, flying vehicles and the like. Perhaps as a testament to a changed world, buildings are not destroyed wantonly (like the Chrysler Building in Armageddon and others). We won't really get into the wave part of the popsicle treatment, except to say that I don't think the Hudson Canyon would support that behavior (it's the only really deep water of the continental shelf area, the wave should have grown significantly before it did — but it looked cool) and if it hit The Lady the way it was portrayed then that's the weirdest wave I've ever heard of. I don't know why they couldn't turn Philly into a popsicle too (although I guess not too many people would have recognized the statue of William Penn popping out of a snow bank), but we're talking Hollywood here so we had to massacre LA and NY. Philadelphia gets to be a place to have an unfortunate accident that sets up a 100 mile (or thereabout) trek across a hostile landscape in the face of a storm no one has ever encountered, much less survived out in the open.

Oh, there is one more formula item to add. Since we're destroying NY as we know it, we need a black street guy with a dog. Emmerich was the butt of the joke with a similar guy in Armageddon (the little 'Taco Bell' chihuahua which attacks the Godzilla toys), so he gets even? with his own guy (Glenn Plummer).

Hmmm, just read Ebert's review, which was disappointing. He thinks they walked from Washington, which means he caught less of the movie that he's professionally reviewing than I did. OK, maybe that's not fair (time will tell) but its possible that there was a subtle hint I picked up that was easily missed. Flying over South Jersey into Philadelphia a couple weeks back tickled a lot of memories that hadn't exactly been foremost in my mind for most of the last twenty five years.