The Day After Tomorrow, Will We All Be Okay?

No. Probably not.

Roland Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow (2004) is twenty years old now, and its vision of climate disaster apocalypse feels at once overdramatic and overly optimistic. The new instant ice age looks silly and overblown; so does the vision of universal catastrophe birthing universal solidarity and a Hollywood happy ending.

The film’s improbable set up is that global warming shuts down the North Atlantic Ocean current, plunging the northern hemisphere into a new ice age heralded by a massive global superstorm, complete with tornadoes in Los Angeles, head-sized hailstones in Japan, massive floods in New York, and sudden terrifying temperature drops to 150 below, flash-freezing airplane fuel and human beings alike. Also, for some reason, wolves.

Various predictable melodramas are grafted onto these escalating weather events. Brave contrarian climatologist Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid) has to search for his son Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal) in the ruins of New York; the Cheney-like climate-change skeptic Vice President (Kenneth Walsh) has to come to terms with his failures and the crisis at hand; there’s a child with cancer, there’s a love interest with a serious injury, etc. etc.

The details are mostly clichéd and/or outright ridiculous—though of course there’s a core of real unpleasantness buried there under the snow and ham. Climate change really will displace millions and possibly billions; water really will rise; dangerous weather events will become more frequent. Everything just occurs more slowly and less visibly in real life.

The film doesn’t actually give a lot of attention to administrative denial and stalling since it’s eager to get to the action. The VP mutters some offhand remarks about how the economy is as fragile as the climate and scoffs at the need to evacuate the entire north of the US. Once the crisis is well underway, though, those in power face reality relatively quickly—much more quickly than the US swung into action in the Covid crisis. No one recommends injecting bleach to fend off the cold. Nor are there armed protests in the wastes as sovereign citizens refuse to abandon their frozen car dealerships.

Instead, Emmerich posits a reverse colonial dynamic in which Americans are forced to emigrate en masse across the Mexican border—first illegally, and then (after the president forgives Latin American debt) by international agreement. In most reverse colonial stories (like John Christopher’s novel The Long Winter) exploiter and exploited switch places, but the exploitation remains the same, essentially justifying exploitation by assuring exploiters that everyone would behave the same way. The Day After Tomorrow takes a different tack. The global south welcomes their former colonizers in their hour of need, which (the movie implies) will fundamentally change the world order, creating a new possibility for cooperation which will be needed in the face of the ice age.

That’s a heartening message. But is it believable? For that matter, does the movie even believe it? We never actually see the Mexican president or any decisionmakers in the global south. The film may promise a new era of amity, but it’s still unable to show us that anyone in the southern hemisphere has a personality, a face, or a voice.

Similarly, Emmerich studiously avoids thinking about where the opportunists have gone to while all this global reshuffling is going on. There are no small-time disaster capitalists selling one way passage to Mexico, no big time disaster capitalists setting up strip mines with coerced labor in the frozen but still resource rich US, no corporate suits pushing for cops to shoot “looters.” The great storm hits and suddenly everyone pulls together—not just everyday people (which would be entirely believable) but politicians and the wealthy, whose first concern in disaster is generally to protect their own power and their own profits. 

There have been other more cynical disaster films like Contagion (2011) and Don’t Look Up (2021) which express greater skepticism about the uniform goodwill of political and financial elites. The Day After Tomorrow, in contrast, is a film about the utter failure of global leadership which somehow ends by reaffirming its faith in that same global leadership, even unto Dick Cheney. Dad comes to the rescue, the nuclear family is reunited, heterosexual romance is the only romance, and the president will make everything all right. Even as the world falls apart, Emmerich can’t, or won’t, imagine one that really challenges the status quo.