Day After Tomorrow, The

Empire Colin Kennedy

Everybody is good at one thing, they say; for Emmerich, it's destruction.

LA Weekly Ella Taylor

This highly entertaining spin on eco-catastrophe could turn the most meteorologically challenged among us into Weather Channel freaks.

The Hollywood Reporter Michael Rechtshaffen

Despite the clunky bits, "Tomorrow" still manages to deliver the blockbuster goods.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

Yes, the movie is profoundly silly. What surprised me is that it's also very scary. The special effects are on such an awesome scale that the movie works despite its cornball plotting.

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

The spectacle, which is colossal and at times staggering to behold, begins within two minutes of the fade-in and keeps coming until the finish. I thought I'd seen it all. I hadn't.

Baltimore Sun Chris Kaltenbach

Better than his previous films, The Day After Tomorrow plays to Emmerich's strengths, making for a thrill ride that rarely disappoints when it matters.

Variety Todd McCarthy

A disarmingly pulpy, eye-popping disaster movie during its first half, and an increasingly dull survival melodrama during its second.

Film Threat Clint Morris

As with "Independence Day," Emmerich has filled his picture with some of the best actors around, only this time the characters seem a bit more 'humane' than, say, Jeff Goldblum's geeky scientist, or Bill Pullman's gung-ho President.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

Several of the special-effects sequences -- a Tokyo hailstorm, a system of tornadoes ripping through L.A. (and tearing up the Hollywood sign), a tidal wave breaking on the East Side and washing through the canyons of Manhattan -- are just dandy.

Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov

Emmerich’s sense of irony has rarely been so pointed, and The Day After Tomorrow, for all its obvious cataclysmic set-pieces and stock characterizations, is nothing if not timely.

Portland Oregonian Marc Mohan

Delivers the expected thrills and groans.

Premiere Aaron Hillis

The real top billing, what audience-goers are obviously shelling out to see, is the computer-generated chaos, and as they should: Digital technology has caught up with our collective imaginations Now More Than Ever.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

The Day After Tomorrow is filled with bad dialogue, stock peril situations, and sketchy character development, but it's a big enough spectacle that those things don't completely derail the film's capacity to be enjoyed.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen

I'm not saying that a date with this picture is all pleasure; but it's not all guilt either.

New York Post Megan Lehmann

Disaster movies, from "The Poseidon Adventure" to "Towering Inferno," are impossible to take seriously and "Day" is no exception - it's simply a fast-moving pageant of end-of-the-world eye candy.

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

Never mind the cool, convincing effects (and they are cool), The Day After Tomorrow teems with illogical action, improbable coincidences. It's pure escapist fare, a popcorn gobbler.

Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

This often entertaining movie mixes grand, epic effects and amazing visualizations of catastrophe with a sappy family-in-crisis plot that would look hackneyed in a '60s Disney TV movie.

Washington Post Michael O'Sullivan

It's the Weather Channel on steroids.

Film Threat Pete Vonder Haar

The really good news is that the disaster money shots are some of the finest ever filmed.

Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum

A decent disaster pic comes down to the handful of colorful individuals who will live (or, depending on the prominence of their billing, die), as it has since the days of chewy disaster meatballs like ''The Towering Inferno'' and ''Earthquake.'' And the heaviest lifting in Emmerich's production falls to Dennis Quaid and Jake Gyllenhaal.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

All this amounts to a badly wasted opportunity, since global warming is a serious issue that deserves thoughtful treatment. So stay home and read a scientific journal instead. This is a disaster movie that lives up to its label.

The New York Times Dana Stevens

The glacierization of half of the world's inhabited land is contemplated with barely a hint of horror. In fact, it looks kind of cool.

New York Daily News Jack Mathews

Really bad movies can be fun, and the dialogue here often attains a level of joyful inanity.

USA Today Mike Clark

Packed with digs at Bush-Cheney that even Democrats could find heavy-handed, the movie's lumbering approach reminds us that, OK, Emmerich did "Independence Day" -- but also 1998's "Godzilla," which began sinking back into the sea in week two.

Miami Herald Connie Ogle

What most hurts The Day After Tomorrow is its unfortunate, lecturing tone.

Boston Globe Wesley Morris

Emmerich does know his way around an action scene -- there's an exciting sequence in which Sam and his buddies run from wolves while looking for meds inside the huge ship that pulls up alongside the library. But he's a master of disaster with no people skills. The characters in The Day After Tomorrow are fantastically stupid.

Village Voice Dennis Lim

Needless to say, the movie fails as a cautionary tale. But it fulfills its summer air-conditioning duties with flippant ease, and its enjoyably cloddish attempts at political relevance add a fascinating layer of incongruity.

Dallas Observer Gregory Weinkauf

While it's marvelously refreshing to observe Mother Nature obliterating L.A. and New York along with caricatures of ghastly world leaders, almost everything good is in the trailer, save perhaps brief run-ins with malevolent wolves and Ian Holm.

The New Yorker Anthony Lane

Even by the standards of disaster movies, The Day After Tomorrow is irretrievably poor: a shambles of dud writing and dramatic inconsequence which left me determined to double my consumption of fossil fuels. [7 June 2004, p. 102]

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

The generally competent B-list actors are hobbled by cliché-ridden dialogue but do their best to react in remotely plausible ways each time the script nails them with some new melodramatic contrivance.

Los Angeles Times Manohla Dargis

The story is too silly, too woefully underwritten, to stake a claim on seriousness.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

Seldom has grandeur struggled so mightily, and fruitlessly, with rampant goofiness.

Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek

Despite the fact that The Day After Tomorrow is harnessed to the very real threat of global warming, it's still just a big, dumb movie, another Hollywood entertainment that, instead of tweaking and teasing our brains for fun, leaves us feeling thick and stupid.

Washington Post Stephen Hunter

Utterly shatters the illusion with a trite plot, banal dialogue, clunky sentimentality and, worst of all, a sort of narrative arbitrariness.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

An exceptionally stupid movie.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Keith Phipps

Emmerich now directs entirely in watered-down Spielbergisms, and his storytelling skills, never strong, have gone slack. His talent for stretching a concept that can be described in 10 seconds into a feature-length movie, on the other hand, remains impressive.

Slate David Edelstein

When it comes to weaving personal stories in and out of the special-effects set pieces, the director has the most colossal antitalent since Ed Wood Jr.

New York Magazine Peter Rainer

The catastrophe is so pulped and exaggerated that uninformed audiences will safely assume that global warming is just a Democratic scare tactic.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

Don't ask whether or not you should take The Day After Tomorrow seriously. Don't take it at all.