(Credits: Far Out / 20th Century Fox)
When The Day After Tomorrow was first released 20 years ago, scientists were already warning about the idea of a worldwide climate crisis. But watching it unfold before our eyes was a spectacle reserved solely for science fiction movies.
Today, as wildfires and unseasonal flash floods ravage all corners of the planet, global temperatures arrive at a dangerous tipping point and entire ecosystems and food supply chains stand on the precipice of all-out disaster, the vision presented by Roland Emmerich’s no longer seems so far-fetched. And it’s almost refreshing to see a blockbuster movie that dared to broach this subject so long ago rising up the global Netflix chart, leaving other disaster films with less real-world relevance trailing in its wake.
Even the allegorical mixed-bag Don’t Look Up, produced and distributed to much fanfare by Netflix itself three years ago, doesn’t have quite the same emotional impact on viewers as watching tornadoes rip through cities, giant hailstones take out cars, and ice sheets engulf the Empire State Building. Some of these scenes in The Day After Tomorrow preempted what have since become real-life phenomena. And so, the level of deadly destruction unleashed by the world’s weather systems in the film, particularly on the good old US of A, brings home just how close we could be to absolute catastrophe.
Dennis Quaid’s climatologist, Jack Hall, told you it was coming. He didn’t even expect it to happen so soon, though. Before he’s had time to convince global political and economic strategists of his predictions, the entire Northern Hemisphere is hit by a wave of superstorms the likes of which have never been seen before. Jack’s son, a student in New York played by a young Jake Gyllenhaal, is placed in grave danger as a tsunami floods Manhattan before freezing over.
He and his friends stay alive by sheltering in the New York Public Library, an apt metaphor for the safe haven of reason and scientific knowledge in the face of impending natural disasters. By the time Jack and his colleague Jason reach the library, Sam’s group are the only survivors.
But what causes this new ice age?
At a Global Warming Conference in New Dehli, Jack presents world leaders with his model for the dramatic climate shift he believes global warming is about to cause. “The Northern Hemisphere owes its temperate climate to the North Atlantic current,” he explains. “Heat from the sun arrives at the equator and is carried north by the ocean. But global warming is melting the polar ice caps and disrupting this flow.” If enough ice falls into the Atlantic Ocean, it could block the flow of the current altogether. “When that occurs, there goes our warm climate.”
Paradoxically, then, it’s global warming and the melting of Arctic ice that ushers in a new ice in The Day After Tomorrow. This plot driver is more-or-less based on actual phenomena in the world today and is backed up by science. There really is a North Atlantic current carrying warm weather to much of the Northern Hemisphere, and it really is being disrupted by the melting of polar ice caps.
However, it will never be disrupted to the extent that the whole of North America, Europe and North Asia freezes over. Instead, this disruption to the circulation of our oceans will likely lead to various different climate changes and freak weather occurrences on a smaller scale, many of them at the same time. Meanwhile, the rising sea levels caused by melting ice caps pose a significant threat to coastal regions across the world.
Nevertheless, the movie does its job in providing a snapshot of just how serious things could get if global warming isn’t reduced in the short term. There might not be a new ice age around the corner, but there are certainly plenty of other disasters on the cards.
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