Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

The science is silly, the politics infantile, but the special effects are what make The Day after Tomorrow what it is. And what is that? Mainly, another sensational destruction of New York City. Manhattan must have done something awful to director Roland Emmerich because he seems obsessed with laying waste to it, again, and again and again. Some weary residents of the battered megalopolis must by saying that it's time for closure. Julian Sanchez sums the film up best:

"The catalyst for the movie's meteorological mayhem is an ice age brought on practically overnight by a vaguely specified disturbance in the Atlantic current caused by melting icecaps. But the effect is not to deliver some kind of chilling, potentially mobilizing warning about the perils of our current environmental policy. Instead, the fantastic and sudden global catastrophe turns a genuine issue into a sci-fi threat: It puts global warming in roughly the same category as attacks by Godzilla or The Blob.... In short, the movie makes a genuine (if tractable) problem into high camp. It's about as likely to spur political pressure for more environmental regulation as the X-Files movie was to prompt demands for an alien invasion defense force."

The global cooling that Roland Emmerich portrays as resulting from global warming might happen sooner than he thinks, but it will be a cooling of the planet's economy and not its climate, and it will be as a result of events in Saudi Arabia and not in the Arctic Circle. In the real world, here's what's going on: "Saudi Arabia's de facto ruler, Crown Prince Abdullah, said in comments carried by the state-run press agency that four militants had killed about 10 Saudis and non-Saudis — including a female child." The dream of these killers is the toppling of the Saudi regime and if they get their way oil won't cost $40, $60 or $80 a barrel; it won't be available at all. The fundamentalists aren't interested in making money. They are interested in returning to the 6th century. Once they get control over the oil wells and turn off the taps, the developed, and developing economies, will cool down dramatically.

Imagine North American highways littered with abandoned SUVs and people in Northern Europe burning the contents of libraries just to stay warm? Why, one could make a disaster movie from such stuff. The only problem for Roland Emmerich is that the baddies are baby-killing Islamic militants and not Dick Cheney and George W. Bush. Still, he'll be able to deal with those troublesome facts some way. The main thing for Emmerich is: Delenda est Manhattan!