The Day After Tomorrow is a science fiction disaster film, directed by Roland Emmerich. It was released to the cinemas in the USA on 28 May 2004.[1] Based on the 1999 book The Coming Global Superstorm by Art Bell and Whitley Strieber, the film stars Dennis Quaid, Jake Gyllenhaal, Ian Holm, Emmy Rossum, and Sela Ward. It depicts catastrophic climatic effects following the disruption of the North Atlantic Ocean circulation in a series of extreme weather events that usher in global cooling and lead to a new ice age.
Story[]
Jack Hall, an American paleoclimatologist, and his colleagues Frank and Jason, drill for ice-core samples in the Larsen Ice Shelf for the NOAA, when the ice shelf suddenly splits away due to greenhouse gas effects. Jack manages to retrieve the vital samples from being loss. At a UN conference in New Delhi, Jack discusses his findings to delegates indicating climate change could have triggered the Ice Age 10,000 years ago; if humans continue consuming Earth's natural resources and burn fossil fuels, it will result in global cooling leading to a new Ice Age, but US Vice President Raymond Becker is more concern about the economy. NOAA administrator Thomas Gomez worries that Becker will cut funding. Professor Terry Rapson, an oceanographer of the Hedland Centre in Scotland befriends Jack over his views of an inevitable climate shift. What Jack and mankind weren't aware of is that the amount of freshwater from the fractured ice shelf drastically shuts down the North Atlantic current when several buoys show a severe temperature drop to 13 degrees. This causes melting polar ice caps in North Atlantic and Gulf Stream to fail in generating warm water and releasing frozen air. Rapson concludes Jack's theories are correct.
Jack's wife Lucy, a physician, begs him to drop off their son Sam at an airport scheduled for New York. He and Jack barely spend time together because of Jack's workaholism. Sam is regularly disregarded by his teachers for being smarter than them. He and his friends Brian Parks and Laura Chapman are to participate in an academic decathlon. The plane they're flying on went through a difficult turbulence because of weather disturbance but managed. In Manhattan, they meet a new friend JD at a party. Sam mainly wants to woo Laura. During a visit at a museum, they see an exhibit of a woolly mammoth related to the prehistoric Ice Age how it was found perfectly preserved in Siberia with its food left undigested inside and froze to death instantly. A downpour hits the city for several days, leading to suspend rail transportations. JD offers the group to stay at his place.
In the meantime, weather conditions get worse across the globe: Tokyo is struck by a giant hail storm, Nova Scotia has a 25-foot (7 meters) storm surge in seconds, and Los Angeles is devastated by a tornado outbreak. Following this, President Blake issues an executive order for the FAA to ground all air traffic across the country. After the NOAA discuss the seriousness, Jack's and Rapson's teams, along with NASA meteorologist Janet Tokada, build a forecast model based on Jack's research. A three-helicopter special task force tasked with rescuing the British Royal family from Balmoral Castle crashes in Scotland after all their fuel lines freeze. Rapson reports this incident and Jack's team anaylze the evaluation: An enormous storm system develops in the northern hemisphere, splitting into three gigantic hurricane-like superstorms above Canada, Scotland, and Siberia. The storms pull frozen air from the upper troposphere into their center, flash-freezing anything caught in their eyes with temperatures below −150 degrees Fahrenheit (−101 degrees Celsius). Rapson and his team perish in the European storm.
New York is soon caught in the North American storm and the weather becomes progressively more violent, resulting in street flooding, and eventually a massive tsunami storm surge inundating Manhattan. This forces Sam's group to run for shelter at the New York Public Library. A french mother and daughter are in danger. Laura, fluent in french, goes back to save them, but cuts her leg. While cellphone communications are down, Sam is able to contact his parents through a working payphone; Jack advises him to stay inside and promises to rescue him. Before Jack prepares his departure to Manhattan, Thomas has Jack give a full testimony to Blake, Becker, and cabinets on climate shift stating that it will last 7 to 10 days. Thomas scolds Becker for not listening Jack's previous warnings. Upon Jack's suggestion, Blake orders the southern states to be evacuated into Mexico; the northern half are doomed to be hit by the superstorm but are warned by the government to seek shelters and stay warm, while Lucy remains in a hospital caring for bed-ridden children, where she and her patients are eventually rescued by the authorities.
With the storm having reached Washington, Blake perishes after his motorcade is caught in it, making Becker the new President. Jack, Jason, and Frank make their way to New York against all odds. In Pennsylvania, Frank falls through the skylight of a mall that had become covered in snow and sacrifices himself by cutting his rope to prevent the others from falling in after him. In the library, most survivors, as well as those from other structures, decide to head south once the floodwater outside freezes in spite of Sam's warnings, and are later found frozen to death by Jack and Jason; only a few survivors end up taking heed of Sam's advice to stay put, burning books to stay warm as the temperatures plunge. Sam and Laura become romantically close. One morning, Laura develops blood poisoning from her injury, whereupon Sam, Brian, and JD scour a Russian cargo vessel that had drifted into the city for penicillin, fending off a pack of wolves which had escaped from Central Park Zoo. The eye of the North American storm arrives, freezing Manhattan solid. Sam's group make it inside in time to keep the fire going. Likewise, Jack and Jason take shelter in an abandoned restaurant. Days later, the superstorms dissipate, and Jack and Jason successfully reach the library, finding Sam's group alive.
Becker, in his first address as president from the US embassy in Mexico, apologizes on television for his ignorance and vows to send helicopters to rescue survivors in the northern states. Jack and Sam's group are picked up near the Statue of Liberty, where many people have survived. On the International Space Station, astronauts look down in awe at Earth's transformed surface, now with ice sheets extending across the northern hemisphere. Humanity still has hope.
Videos[]
Official trailer