Bill Crider's Pop Culture Magazine

Judy and I went to see The Day After Tomorrow yesterday. The theater was pretty crowded for a Tuesday afternoon, so I guess the movie's a hit. I was reminded all the way through not of the disaster movies like The Towering Inferno or Earthquake but of the old B&W SF movies of the 1950s. In those movies it was always The Bomb (or some variation thereof) that was wreaking havoc with nature, and all the familiar tropes are present in The Day After Tomorrow: the good-looking lead scientist, the diagrams, the pseudo-scientific explanations for what's happening, the guy you know is gonna die (sacrificing himself for the others, of course), the doubting Thomas who's finally converted when he sees the giant grasshoppers -- I mean when he sees the horrible results of the massive storms -- and all the rest. What's not to like? And the special effects were fun, too.