Yesterday was one of those days...computer problems in the morning, multiple meetings in the afternoon, fish that refused to accede to my sexual demands, and then, due to some logistical problems, I had to cancel a planned trip to Crookston to visit my wife. It just wasn't a good day. So I decided to catch a movie in town.

The Day After Tomorrow.

A perfectly appropriate end to a delightful day.

This movie was awful. The flaws are immense. I can say without reservation that this was the worst movie I've seen in a year, and I saw Van Helsing. The Day After Tomorrow fails grimly in several prominent components.

Science. The science behind this science-fiction story was just bad. Everything was absurdly amplified and accelerated: centuries of gradual change isn't fast enough, it had to be compressed into weeks. Even that wasn't enough, they needed traumatic, world-changing events that occurred in a day. And whoa, that's not speedy enough for a chase scene, so they invented a vortex that sucks cold out of the upper atmosphere and visibly freezes everything in minutes. The science in this movie was almost as bad as that of The Core—the writers had apparently heard a few garbled ideas about paleoclimate, and used them as a springboard for outright inventing random pseudo-scientific crap entirely for 'dramatic' effect.

Global warming is a real problem. The premise at the heart of this movie is not real. There is zero respectable science in it.

Politics. The fact that MoveOn.org has jumped on The Day After Tomorrow as a cause celebre is simply embarrassing. At a time when the Right is overtly, hostilely anti-science, it would be nice to have my side strongly on the side of reason, but jeez, instead the Moonbat Left comes out prancing. This movie is not about global warming. It is not a reasonable extrapolation of trends. It is not a celebration of good research and evidence-based planning. It's a garish big-budget slasher movie with casualties in the billions and a callous, psychopathic blindness towards human suffering.

It's ludicrous that MoveOn could think this movie would be useful "to help get people talking about the real danger of a climate crisis, and to take action to prevent one." I don't see the Republicans touting the new Spiderman movie as an opportunity to get communities involved in a dialog about street crime.

And like the science, the politics in this movie were simply unreal. Glaciers are going to bury the Northern Hemisphere? Pause. Expression of angst on the faces of a few actors. Think. Hmmm. Well, we completely write off the northern half of the US and let everyone there die, and we send the army to the southern states and shoo everyone off to Mexico, which is unchanged and completely unaffected by the event. Problem solved! Actors quickly replace pursed lips and furrowed brows with expressions of relief and steely resolve!

And dear gog, the unrelenting, selfish Americanism of the movie! Aside from a few brief scene-setting vignettes (Japanese salaryman gets bonked on the head by falling ice; stoic Scotsmen down a few shots of 12-year-old Scotch before freezing to death; it snows in New Delhi), it's all us, US, US. All Americans north of the Mason-Dixon line get abandoned, but not a word about Canada. The only concern is what will happen to the good ol' US of A, which, by the way, consists mostly of New York.

As a movie. I tried. I really tried. The science, the premise, the reactions, and the conclusions of this movie defied belief, but I struggled to ignore all that and watch it as pure escapist, fantasy entertainment. I couldn't. Underneath all the special effects, this is an incompetently made movie.

As much as I hated this movie, the really damning thing about it as a movie is that halfway through, I was bored by it. I didn't care what happened to these people. When one of the cardboard characters cuts a rope to fall to his death, saving a couple other I-don't-give-a-crap characters, it wasn't heroic self-sacrifice: I was thinking, "Selfish bastard. He found a way to cop out of this debacle."

Characters are trotted out, do some schtick that does nothing for the plot, and disappear. Plotlines are set up, generate a flurry of activity, and then get painlessly resolved off-camera. The whole central plotline of the movie, a valiant hike from Washington, DC to New York in the superstorm, is superfluous—the hero's appearance changes nothing, accomplishes nothing, and if it had been cut completely from the movie, would have had no effect on the story. Everywhere are signs of lazy filmmaking, of a wretched lack of care.

Symptomatic of the whole enterprise was the ending. It's not giving away too much to say that Emmerich goes for the usual superficial 'happy' ending he tacks onto his disaster epics. A few people are saved, everyone is grinning, music swells, we're apparently supposed to be proud of the plucky survivors...but behind it all, he's invented a catastrophe in which billions die, great swathes of the planet are rendered uninhabitable, future problems of immense complexity loom, and millions of people have been swindled into paying good money to watch dreck. And none of that gets a moment's consideration.

Oh, well, at least I wasn't one of the hoodwinked millions. I got in free (although I did buy popcorn; I support my local movie house). My son works at the theater, and gets to take a guest a week to the show gratis. Since this wasn't the kind of movie you'd take a cute girl to see, he brought me instead. The unsolicited opinion of an above-average teenaged boy on The Day After Tomorrow: "Boring!" And an equally unsolicited counterbalance to my review of the movie: "But Dad, you complain about every movie you see."