Le Jour d'après

La première moitié de Le Jour d'après est agréable mais ne surprend en rien. Nous avons déjà tout vu dans la bande-annonce. Et la deuxième moitié est simplement ennuyeuse. Ce n'est certes pas l'œuvre de science-fiction la plus idiote de Roland Emmerich, mais c'est la moins divertissante. Alors que Stargate et Independence Day étaient des jouets sincères d'un enfant-adulte avoué, Le Jour d'après est un drame sérieux qui essaie de paraître important réalisé par un réalisateur moyen. (26/05/2004)

Turning off your brain and not looking for any meaning to it is the way to approach what Emmerich presents in his two-hour disaster vision of the coarsest grain. Although it might irritate climatologists, why get upset when he serves us a picture of thousands of Americans begging to enter Mexico? At that moment, it is necessary to have a hearty laugh and lightly acknowledge that there is no more American American than this defector German, who spends high budgets like the biggest snob and yet unabashedly winks at the audience, almost begging them to enjoy the ride with him. Serving up a few remarkable special effects sequences pleasantly elevates the dose of patriotism, which could knock down an elephant, and it's necessary to handle it with an eye roll and a loud chuckle. The perfect sabotage of Hollywood! (16/06/2004)

“Well, that’s the ice age for you..." Dr. Emmet Brown might have said. The Day After Tomorrow is a success in terms of special effects and completely empty in terms of ideas. Lots of clichés and lameness. On the other hand, it has a pretty solid storytelling pace. If you’re looking forward to a popcorn movie where you have a few laughs at the expense of the creators and don’t fall asleep due to pure boredom, The Day After Tomorrow is just the movie for you. (28/05/2004)

My beloved Roland "Americ" Emmerich is back, and I have to admit, I'm a little disappointed. Unfortunately, The Day After Tomorrow is not as beautifully stupid as Godzilla or Independence Day, nor does it have the true spirit of capitalist realism; it's just an average product from the disaster film factory. The brisk first half of the film is held together by great tricks and dynamic editing, but in the second half the director takes over control and proves once again that when he has to shoot with actors without the support of digital technology, there are some gaps in his work. The main faces are bland, the dialogues are half-assed (see the one about Nietzsche, which is supposed to indicate how much a more educated American viewer knows about the legend of world philosophy), this time pathos tries to avoid the national aspects – strangely quite successfully – but still has the gift of inadvertently entertaining (Who is it? – MY DAD :o))). Technically, it works well, it's nice to look at, but the impression is killed by the protracted and considerably dull second half of the film. All they had to do was add a little exaggeration and cut down the evident ecological moralizing... and The Day After Tomorrow might even have been a slightly above-average piece of eye candy. The way it is, it looks nice and amounts to average nothing with BIG effects. (02/06/2004)

Leaving aside the obvious fact that the processes of flow change and cooling that Emmerich describes in this film are long-term and span many decades (OK, exaggeration, I'll take it), the rest of the story is the essence of everything that is wrong with contemporary Hollywood: the tired clichés, the boring to tedious predictability of everything that happens on screen, the shoddy psychology of the cookie-cutter characters on the level of a literary attempts of a ten-year-old. The result is an unhealthy toying with the intelligence and tolerance of the normally thinking viewer. EMMERICH, GET OUT!!!! PS: To rate a film with a few stars just because it has great visual effects seems misguided to me. Nowadays, good special effects are par for the course, not an exception. (03/12/2005)