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Now available on DVD is Roland Emmerich's "The Day After Tomorrow", this summer's blockbuster disaster movie, starring Dennis Quaid, Jake Gyllenhaal, Ian Holm, Emmy Rossum and a handful of other no name actors and actresses, most of whom end up drowned or frozen. The movie basically centres around a major shift in the world's climate that climatologist Jack Hall (Quaid) sees as a major problem in the very near future. Hall's very near future is years away. He predicts the possible onset of a modern day ice age but the government dismisses his theory as ludricrous. Only days after Hall makes his daring predictions, strange things start happening. A giant hail storm in Japan, snow in India, multiple tornadoes in Los Angeles and soon, a giant tidal wave envelopes New York City, only to be followed by deadly freezing temperatures, ice and snow. Jack's son Sam (Gyllenhaal) is trapped in New York so Jack and a couple of his pals pack up their Arctic gear, slap on son snow shoes and begin a trek that will take them from Philadelphia to a New York library that is buried under 200 feet of snow, where they hope Sam and his friends were able to survive the ice cold temperatures.
The Day After Tomorrow is one of the most purely entertaining movies that I saw this past summer. I realize the movie was littered with problem after problem - a weak story, weak characters, parts in the movie that defied logic, CGI wolves that defied logic - but in the end, I was fascinated enough by the "disaster" part of the movie and the special effects that resulted, that I was able to thoroughly enjoy The Day After Tomorrow.
The extras on the DVD begin with two audio commentaries - one by director/co-writer Roland Emmerich and producer Mark Gordon and the other by co-writer Jeffrey Nachmanoff, cinematographer Ueli Steiger, editor David Brenner and production designer Barry Chusid. I can't really say either commentary was particularly exhilerating. The Emmerich/Gordon commentary is typical of many director/producer commentaries. They compliment the actors/actresses, talk about budget restraints and overspending, complain about the cold weather in Montreal, just pretty standard stuff in a commentary that is littered with foul language by Mr. Gordon.
The second commentary concentrates more on the technical aspects of the movie, so if that's the sort of stuff that gets your fancy, then this commentary is tailor-made for you, especially considering some of the grandoise effects that took place in this movie.
The next special feature on the DVD is the Deleted Scenes. This feature really is only two dinky little scenes from the movie which I found to be quite confusing considering it was mentioned in each commentary time and again how many scenes were cut out of the movie. And this is all they could come up with for the DVD?
Next up is the "Audio Anatomy: Interactive Demo", where you can watch a helicopter scene in the movie and mix eight different tracks of audio associated with this scene. It was a pretty interesting exercise and was fun to try out - once.
Finally, there are the DVD-ROM features. This is the real gem of the DVD, in terms of extras for this movie. Amongst the extras on the DVD-ROM is a section called "Exclusive Behind the Scenes Clips" which is more or less a "making of" section that includes 10 short featurettes, ranging from 4 1/2 minutes to 8 1/2 minutes. Each featurette includes some outstanding behing the scenes footage and comment from members of the cast and crew. The one that stood out for me shows us how the flooding of New York scene was filmed inside of a man-made flood tank - very cool stuff.
There is also a "Global Watch" feature which points out the disaster areas around the world, according the Emmerich's movie and a section called "City Freeze" that shows us what would happen in eight major cities around the world if there actually was an ice age.
Overall, The Day After Tomorrow is an enjoyable movie if you try not to think too much about the story, the characters, the semantics of an actual climate shift in the world and anything else in this movie that may require some thought. Just from a pure "disaster" movie point of view, The Day After Tomorrow has great special effects and at times, is extremely intense. The special features on the DVD are sparse, to say the least, and disappointing, but if you are able to get the DVD-ROM features working, then you will get to see some footage that is quite interesting.
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