Posthuman Blues

I just saw "The Day After Tomorrow," which was precisely the kind of movie I was in the mood for. I wanted to see it because I generally like high-budget disaster movies and also because I'd read the book upon which it was loosely based, "The Coming Global Superstorm" by Art Bell and Whitley Strieber.





"Tomorrow" is an FX-driven movie. I knew that going in and I got what I wanted. Not that the acting was appalling; Dennis Quaid was good, and I was relieved that Jake Gyllenhaal ("Donnie Darko") was chosen to play his son rather than a more conventional heart-throb. Thankfully, the teen romance angle was kept at a healthy minimum and the scenes of global climate chaos were mostly entrancing. Who doesn't want to see New York City flash-frozen by a super-hurricane?

My main complaint is that I wanted the disasters to be worse than they actually were. I wasn't content to see the Northern Hemisphere buried under a mantel of ice; I wanted the whole goddamned planet to get what was coming to it. If I'd written the screenplay, I would have invoked quantum mechanics and had the storm cells achieve sentience . . .

But no one asked.