A disastrous write-off

Poor lovely Jake wasn't having a good day

10 April 2012

The disaster movie is a comparatively recent phenomenon. This is not to suggest that the cinema hasn't always traded on the entertaining spectacle of material destruction and loss of human life. Whether it's Samson tearing down the temple, or the Union Army torching Atlanta, the camera's eye dwells as adoringly on crushed bodies and flames licking flesh as it does on any love scene.

Mikhail Bakunin's maxim, "The lust for destruction is a creative lust", might have been coined with Hollywood in mind. But this being noted, the fact remains that the disaster movie only really crystallised in 1970, when Arthur Hailey's quintessential airport novel, Airport, was brought to the screen.

Mixing an A-list cast - Burt Lancaster, Jean Seberg, Dean Martin - with a B-movie format, Airport established the idea that, as our own Alexander Walker put it at the time, "For sheer contentment there is nothing to beat the sight of constant catastrophe happening to others."

So successful was this schadenfreude franchise that Airport was followed not only by its own four

sequels but also spawned disasters at sea (The Poseidon Adventure, 1972), on land (Earthquake, 1974) and in the sky (The Towering Inferno, also 1974). To be a film-goer coming of age during this decade was to think of blockbusters as disaster movies first and foremost.

Why should this have been so? In part it was because the technology was by then available to make incandescent skyscrapers, ruckled carpet landscapes and somersaulting liners look sufficiently credible for a mass audience to suspend disbelief.

But, more significantly, the 1970s were the midpoint decade between the largely optimistic futurity of the 1950s and the increasingly pessimistic environmentalism of our own era. Viewed as allegories, the 1970s disaster movies were all about the perils of human Prometheanism: "Look out," they said, "steal fire from the gods and they'll zap your cruise ship."

That some of the scenarios were predicated on technological failure, while others derived from natural disasters made no difference, for both kinds expressed the same anxiety about human mental hubris set beside human physical frailty.

As it was with the now classic disaster movies of the 1970s, so will it be with this year's cataclysmic offering, Roland Emmerich's behemoth of twaddle, The Day After Tomorrow. The environmental fears that lie behind this disaster movie are only a global expansion of the ones that shadowed its predecessors. Just as Emmerich's Independence Day was a contribution to the 1950s sci-fi genre, so too this film is nothing new under the sun.

Rachel Carson's Silent Spring was published in 1962, and the Blueprint for Survival in 1972, and between them they helped to promote awareness of the damage that humanity was doing to the earth through its rapaciousness and to run up the tremulous curtain on to which the 1970s disaster movies could be projected.

Like them, The Day After Tomorrow is a beautifully ironic enactment, proving that humankind has now technologically advanced just sufficiently to depict realistically the awful consequences of that advancement.

For Emmerich's $125 million film, vast sets were constructed and huge computer programs deployed. The depiction of the flooding of Manhattan by a 300ft tidal wave used up 400,000 gallons of water, recycled between two tanks at the rate of 5,000 gallons a minute. I would hazard that this waste of water and power alone will have completely offset any practical environmental awareness that the film generates.

Of course, no disaster movie ever spawned a protest movement. No one urged the Californian state government to stop building on the San Andreas Fault after seeing Earthquake, for the simple reason that the drama - as all dramas should - provided an effective catharsis.

Tensions were released, anxieties were quelled, and the punters went back to their workaday lives comfortably reassured that nothing as bad as that could really happen.

Sadly I don't think The Day After Tomorrow will pacify audiences as well as its predecessors, because even as disaster movies go, this one is a write-off.

Simplistic they may have been, but the 1970s movies were genuinely starstudded. When celluloid heroes were being run through such ordeals, it made a plush seat in a warm, dark cinema seem that much more attractive, while at the same time placing their on-screen travails comfortably beyond the common weal. Emmerich forgot this formula when he cast Dennis Quaid as Jack Hall, the dashing climatologist whose historical analysis of the sudden coming of the last Ice Age is transmogrified into an uncanny prediction of the imminent arrival of the next.

It's not that Quaid isn't a perfectly okay actor, but he is not a big star. Supposing if he were, it would still leave this film three or four short of the required constellation. Even Ian Holm (as fellow boffin Terry Rapson), effective thespian that he is, doesn't give the impression that he is a preening prima donna off-set.

The next important thing for a good disaster movie is that the heroes should save people; not everyone by any means, but a respectable fraction of those imperilled, say one out of 100 at the outside. Given the global nature of this disaster, the ratio of the saved falls to around 1:1,000,000, and since that one is the personable - but hardly magnetic - Jake Gyllenhaal, as Jack Hall's son Sam, it is hard to see the virtue of the exercise here.

This is the only real narrative strand in the film, and it has to serve as massively emblematic of how the gas-guzzling fathers have betrayed their environmentally endangered sons ... and yet save them! "Aaargh! Look out!" I wanted to shout, "a massive load of corn is about to fall on us all!"

As for poor Ian Holm, he can't even save himself, and has to succumb bravely in his Scottish weather station supping Laphroaig. There are assorted bit players caught up like sweet wrappers in the three mighty tornadoes laying waste to the planet, but what the genre requires is recognisable B-list actors in cameo vignettes.

instead, we get George Bush and Dick Cheney lookalikes as oafish President and snide Vice President. The latter refuses to listen to Hall's prognostications at a conference in New Delhi and, even after the mega-storm is underway, is slow to evacuate south and save the lives of thousands of extras.

In fairness to the Vice President, it's difficult to see what exactly he could have done anyway, The Day After Tomorrow envisages half the globe being iced-up in a matter of three or four days, with only a few weeks' warning in the shape of mobile phone-crushing hail storms. How exactly could he be expected to reverse 200 years of industrialisation that quickly?

There has been much talk about the telescoped time-frame that the film envisages for climate change as a result of global warming. Of course, it shifts the whole scenario beyond the credible for its audience, but then the scenario remains incredible for most, even when it's forecasted to take place over the next 50 or 100 years.

The real problem with the temperature dropping to a hundred degrees below freezing in a matter of seconds is that it makes for a cheesy special effect.

The tornadoes whipping Los Angeles to a froth and the tidal wave swamping Manhattan are both beautifully done, but when the RAF helicopters dashing to save the Queen from Balmoral freeze-dry in the sky and plummet to the ground, it's just Sensurround all over again.

Then there's the product placements: Honda, Leica, Seiko, Toyota, Sky News and Fox (particularly egregious given that this is a Murdoch movie), and, oddly, Wendy Burgers. All are given prominent screen-time; but why would these companies want their stuff featured in a film that implicitly condemns them as part of the problem?

The Day After Tomorrow is a beautiful exercise in such self-delusion. Far from highlighting the threat posed by global warming, it's real aim is, perversely, to gull us into yet more carbon-emitting consumption. Nero may have fiddled while Rome burned, but that was only because the camcorder hadn't been invented yet.

The Day After Tomorrow
Cert: 12A

A disastrous write-off

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