The Core II: The Day After Tomorrow

my rating:

A movie like The Day After Tomorrow does wonders to reaffirm one's faith in the stupidity of humankind. I'm not referring to the movie's "message" about how politicians are ignoring the dangers of upsetting the delicate balance of our global climate. I'm talking about the stupidity of every damn character in the movie, including the "smart" ones. And the stupidity of the people who'll tell you how great the movie is.

The only smarts this movie shows are contained in the special effects sequences. It took some pretty sharp minds to develop that technology, and the results are quite impressive. You've seen bits of about half of them in the commercials and trailers: the tornadoes ripping up LA, the tidal surge gushing through Manhattan, the continent-sized hurricane as seen from orbit, etc. I was looking forward to seeing the film just for those, and I wasn't disappointed... by them.

The problem is that they were wrapped in such a lame screenplay. The basic structure of the plot is formula: Visionary scientist warns that disaster is imminent but no one listens. Disaster strikes. Lots of people die, except for the handful that we're supposed to really care about, particularly including the family of the aforementioned scientist. Life carries on.

The problem is that the scientist in question doesn't appear to be that smart. So everyone else has to become majorly stupid to make him look better. So we have people in LA watching multiple tornadoes bearing down on them (even flying between them in a helicopter, like the planes did in X2) instead of going for cover. The government of Mexico closes their border to a wave of yanqui refugees, even though it's obvious they're fleeing for their lives, and would have the backing of a certain military superpower based in Washington. The President of the US stays in the White House (with much of the furniture and decor already stripped out) until everyone else has left, rather than immediately evacuating to a safe location for the sake of national security. It goes on and on and on. A rescue team accidentally treks onto the glass roof of a shopping mall. A Russian tanker of some kind drifts down a flooded NYC street. Several characters take refuge in a squat public library (not much of a shelter against a flood), just so we can have some comments about the sacrilege of burning books for warmth. The International Space Station does cartwheels in orbit as if that were perfectly normal (which it would only do if smacked really hard by a Soyuz module bringing supplies). Ultimately these aren't about the stupidity of the characters, but about the writers and their assumptions about the audience.

I'm calling this film The Core II, because the science, the writing, and such were nearly as bad. It could never live up to the original, but it certainly tried.