Posted on 06/01/2004 10:52:08 AM PDT by .cnI redruM
All summer movies want to create buzz, but rarely is the intended buzz "Support the McCain-Lieberman bill." The movie is "The Day After Tomorrow," the global-warming flick that aims to gin up support for the sort of greenhouse-emissions regulation sponsored by John McCain and Joe Lieberman.
The premise of "The Day After Tomorrow" is as laughable as its dialogue. "I think we've hit a critical desalination point" passes for snappy repartee in the film, as global warming melts the polar ice caps. This disrupts the Gulf Stream, plunging North America into a new ice age. Tidal waves devastate New York City, which is then buried under ice and snow (ensuring the defeat, by the way, of whoever is running City Hall, since New Yorkers would never tolerate a mayor who couldn't clear the streets after a snowstorm).
Al Gore has given the movie two green thumbs up, and the left-wing group MoveOn.org is promoting it. Never mind that the movie's scenario is absurd. There is no such thing as a flash freeze that makes helicopters fall out of the air. Nor can an ice age descend in a matter of days. More sober environmentalists worry that the very ridiculousness of the film will discredit their cause.
The innocent moviegoer will be confused that a movie about global warming features so much snow. But this is keeping with the trend of global-warming advocates laying claim to any unusual weather. When winters are bitterly cold, it is a sign of "climate change." When winters are unseasonably warm, it too is a sign of climate change. It is an all-purpose phrase, since the climate is always "changing" and therefore by definition vindicating environmentalists.
That said, global warming is a fact. The surface temperature has gone up roughly 1 degree Celsius since the mid-19th century. The warming during the past 30 years might even be partly a result of manmade emissions. But we're talking very small and gradual changes that aren't causing the disruptions environmentalists sometimes hype, like extreme weather or dangerously rising sea levels.
Any regulatory fix will have only the slightest effect. Climatologist Patrick Michaels estimates that the Kyoto Treaty -- McCain-Lieberman is a watered-down version of the treaty -- would prevent only 0.07 degrees Celsius of warming over the next 50 years. The best solution to greenhouse emissions is the kind of technological innovation that has made America's economy steadily cleaner. Economic growth is the environment's best friend, creating both new, cleaner technologies and giving people the luxury to worry more about the environment and less about their own sustenance. But anti-growth environmentalists don't want to hear that, which brings us back to "The Day After Tomorrow."
Why is New York the setting for the film's most graphic mayhem? It is the iconic American city, so it's always a tempting backdrop for disaster movies. But something else might be at work. As environmental writer Iain Murray has argued, New York is the emblematic expression of America's capitalist civilization, and is therefore something of an affront to critics of that civilization, foreign and domestic.
The makers of "The Day After Tomorrow" revel in the prospect of our civilization being brought low, humiliated for its sins. In the film, desperate Americans flee illegally across the Mexican border to escape the weather cataclysm. Get the irony? After the disaster, the Dick Cheney-like vice president apologizes, essentially for the fact that his country has been running a modern economy lo these many years: "We were wrong. I was wrong." Even with America's economy destroyed, even with millions dead, there is a bright spot. At the end, an astronaut comments from far above our frozen continent: "The air has never been so clear." All the SUVs are buried under the tundra!
"The Day After Tomorrow" might not be much of a movie, but it is useful for providing a glimpse into the soul of left-wing environmentalism. Pretty chilling.
The fact that Americans have to go as "hat-in-hand" refugees across the Rio Grande to Mexico should tell anyone who wants to know what the agenda of this movie is. "Nayh, nayh! We told you so, Mr. Smarty Capitalist!" What a mess!
Sounds as stupid as that flick on the SciFi channel where the villan was giant blood sucking mosquitos the size of crows.
A review of the turkey movie:
"To combat this, Emmerich keeps trying to up the dramatic ante by adding contrivances so overdone that
they quickly become absurd. Instead of one devastating tornado hitting L.A., he gives us no fewer than
six. Instead of merely being content with the suspense of a key later scene revolving around a mission by
the estranged son to retrieve some penicillin from an abandoned ship to save the pretty girl from blood
poisoning, he has the son also being chased by rogue wolves. Instead of simply having the Sela Ward
character be a dedicated doctor, he makes her only apparent patient be a cancer-stricken boy (whoops, a
blind, cancer-stricken boy) whose parents have disappeared and who cannot be moved without an
ambulance. Without the excesses, these moments might have worked; with them larded on, they take an
already silly story and tip it into sheer preposterousness to such a degree that they could be considered
self-parody if Emmerich ever displayed any evidence of a sense of self-reflexive humor. "
"quite possibly the single stupidest film ever to spring from the mind of writer/director Roland
Emmerich"
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/click/movie-1132625/reviews.php?critic=columns&sortby=default&page=5&rid=1284412
Another review of this turkey. I cant believe anyone over the age of 14 would actually enjoy this non-believable schlock ...
http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/listings/film/726/index.html
" Welcome to the year's big mystery movie, the mystery being: Who the hell greenlights insipid Irwin Allen
wannabes? Entertainment value and political provocation prove shockingly lacking as the haughty,
gross-pollutin' northern hemisphere gets ravaged and flash-frozen by moderately nifty CG superstorms,
summoning an instantaneous ice age. Ever-reliable Dennis Quaid plays paleo-climatologist "Jack" (along with
"Nick," a stock name usually indicative of terrible screenwriting) whose promise-keepin' ways send him
walking impossible miles of sub-sub-Arctic tundra toward devastated Manhattan to help his outrageously
boring "teenage" son (Jake Gyllenhaal) save cardboard characters who can outrun massive tidal waves and
even the lethal cold itself. While it's marvelously refreshing to observe Mother Nature obliterating L.A. and
New York along with caricatures of ghastly world leaders, almost everything good is in the trailer, save
perhaps brief run-ins with malevolent wolves and Ian Holm. What remains is a bumbling, sappy, laughably
self-serious test of patience as director and co-writer Roland Emmerich (the failed American Godzilla remake)
preaches to the environmentally converted his dumbed-down gospel of Green. -- Gregory Weinkauf
I ask that you all also pledge not to watch "The Day After Tomorrow" ... first because it is so bad...
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/click/movie-1132625/reviews.php?critic=columns&sortby=default&page=5&rid=1284412
"quite possibly the single stupidest film ever to spring from the mind of writer/director Roland
Emmerich"
Not only is it a horrible movie, a rotten disaster flick chock-full of bad anti-Bush/Cheney hits and cheezy ecofreak
globaloney, BUT it was made by this director Emmerich, who is a Big-Time clymer and bush-hating leftist.
He said: "With a policy of fear they tried to find a pretext to invade Iraq after September 11. The
Americans were made insecure, to make them agree to that. The intelligent Americans are so appalled by
what their
president does, you cannot imagine it."
" The United States are the most powerful country, and there sits George W. Bush, a
president who cares about nothing but oil. How different would the world be if the Democratic
environmentalist politician
Al Gore would have come to power? All this is hard to bear for me as a German. I never want to be an
American."
"America is the oldest democracy in the world. Since then they have totally developed beckwards. Euope
was most of the time under
monarchic influence [sic], but is today three or four times as democratic as America."
"Al Gore had the consent of the regular voters, and
only the electoral college finally changed it. I still think it was a family affair in Florda. There was something
fishy about it."
please, folks, QUIT THROWING YOUR MONEY AT ANTI-AMERICAN LEFTIST
MILLIONAIRES!!
Roland Emmerich: Ein Spätentwickler wettert los ("Day After Tomorrow" Director Hates Bush-MUST
READ)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1143613/posts
This guy is as bad a Sean Penn, and his 'work product' aint as good.
Quit feeding the beast. Defund the left!
To all those activists at the core of pushing this global warming nonsense: The Soviet Union is dead; get over it.
Sounds as if this would be hilarious as a satire.
Any crediblity this movie could have gained, (and I mean that on the stretch that it ever could be, was lost on how they dipicted the President and Vice President.
They had a guy who kinda looked like Dick Cheney who was protrayed to be a complete unfeeling jerk. The President was protrayed as this deer in the headlights mindless unleader who kept asking the VP for advice. The VP seemed to be running the country. They were making a backhanded slap on our current administration.
This movie is not even entertaining in that they seem to fall all over themselves so hard in trying to make statements and political points they forgot about developing an entertaining plot.
If Al Gore is a film critic, do the opposite.
Count on John McCain to be part of something stupid.
Why is it always "we have raised the temperature by 1 degree since the 19th century". Could it be that we have better more accurate thermometers now? Could it be that we take temperature samples in more places now? Or could it be that the greenies are always rounding up to get to that 1 degree. Note that they claim .07 degrees by enacting Kyoto but only refer to a 1.00 degree change since the 19th century.
Sounds as if this one will join TROY as another dud for 2004. I wanted to go see a movie Sunday with the girlffriend, but there was literally nothing that we found interesting. Instead rented and watched IN AMERICA.
I totally disagree. I just saw "Van Helsing", and unless we realize the potential danger caused by Dracula and his ever-growing army of the undead, our children will be the ones who suffer.
Ditto that, one of the most BS movies ever released.
more FREE publicity for a 'b' movie!
I guess the hollywierd leftist thought that creating a philosophical argument for a movie would create interest (A la Passion)...
Through all the 'conservative' blather here, I would tend to agree that the leftist propaganda has brainwashed everyone successfully.
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