"The Day After Tomorrow"
Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and when that gal happens to be Mother Nature, you'd better be prepared for one wild temper tantrum.

In "The Day After Tomorrow" (20th Century Fox), a big-budget, special effects-laden disaster flick directed by Roland Emmerich, humanity must stave off environmental elimination when cataclysmic changes in Earth's climate, triggered by global warming, rapidly usher in a new ice age.

The doomsday drama opens with a narrative icebreaker --- literally --- during which paleoclimatologist Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid) witnesses a glacier the size of Rhode Island break off the Antarctic ice shelf. He attends an environmental conference of world leaders in an abnormally snowy New Delhi, India, but his Cassandra-like forewarnings of an impending climatastrophe fall on deaf ears.

Hall's worst fears are confirmed when a colleague in Scotland (Ian Holm) gives him bad news: Accelerated by the greenhouse effect, melting polar ice caps have cooled the warming jet stream which keeps the Northern Hemisphere hospitably mild, thereby disrupting the currents that stabilize Earth's climate. The out-of-whack weather patterns open the door to killer tornadoes, deadly hailstorms and biblical-proportion floods.

But that's not the worst of it: Three monster hurricanes are converging into a global superstorm which threatens to plunge North America and most of Europe into a deep freeze.

Though slow to act, the president (Perry King) finally orders the evacuation of states south of the Mason-Dixon Line; it's too late for everyone else. In the ultimate ironic twist, the film contains a scene of fleeing Americans desperately trying to cross into the relative warmth of Mexico and being turned away at the border.

Hall, however, must snowshoe it in the opposite direction, through bone-chilling blizzards, in order to save his supersmart son, Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal), who was in New York City for an academic competition when disaster struck in the form of a gigantic tidal wave. With the soggy Big Apple looking more like Venice, Sam is holed up with a handful of survivors in the Manhattan Public Library, forced to burn books in order to keep alive in the plummeting temperatures.

Brimming with spectacular Irwin Allen-esque sequences, "The Day After Tomorrow" is pure popcorn fun. What better way to spend Memorial Day weekend than watching the world as we know it being destroyed by nature gone mad? Some viewers may feel a twinge of guilt about driving that greenhouse gas-emitting SUV home from the theater.

As in most disaster movies, don't expect much in way of character depth. Ditto for acting. Most of the performances require little more than the ability to stare, mouth agape, at some oncoming climatic calamity or maintain a straight face while delivering hackneyed, pseudo-scientific dialogue like "I think we've hit a critical desalinization point."

The real stars here are the special effects and, boy, do they shine. Highlights (or lowlights, depending on how far inland you live) include the destruction of Los Angeles by a tag-team of twisters and the tsunami that takes Manhattan.

With all the grapefruit-size hail falling, some had to have made holes in the plot. As for story plausibility, you don't need to merely suspend your disbelief --- you need to leave it at home. But who cares? It's a summer movie! Though the basic science behind the fiction is based on generally accepted greenhouse theories, the movie plays fast and loose with the facts. Such drastic climate changes would take decades, if not centuries, as opposed to the telescoped timeline depicted in the film.

Still, the release of "The Day After Tomorrow" has been used by some critics of the current administration to slam President Bush's environmental policies, especially those concerning global warming. The filmmakers have distanced themselves from the political fray, insisting that it is "just a movie," but the partisan implications are hard to miss. The film features a vice president (Kenneth Welsh) who bears more than a passing resemblance to Dick Cheney.

Sadly, in a film dealing with tragedy on a worldwide scale, references to God or spirituality are noticeably absent, apart from a few scattered verbal afterthoughts.

However, buried beneath the blockbuster budget and apocalyptic visuals is a message about familial love, selfless heroism and the indomitable spirit of man. It also serves as a reminder of our sacred duty to take care of the world God has entrusted to us. Genesis teaches us that the Lord has made us stewards of creation; we must learn to take that humbling responsibility more seriously.

Due to intense scenes of natural disasters, the USCCB Office for Film & Broadcasting classification is A-II -- adults and adolescents. The Motion Picture Association of America rating is PG-13 -- parents are strongly cautioned. Some material may be inappropriate for children under 13.

---CNS

David DiCerto is on the staff of the Office for Film & Broadcasting of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.