The Day After Tomorrow
THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW OPENS FRI., MAY 28
THEY SAY THAT Hollywood's greatest gift to mankind is that its movies help the average Joe escape from his wretched life for 90 precious minutes to a world where dreams become reality.
So it should strike us as a little worrying that the fantasy at the heart of this summer's super-blockbuster, The Day After Tomorrow, is nothing short of the total, epic, violent destruction of America. And not just America, but Manhattan.
The cumshot in this preview is a scene showing a tsunami of sea water barreling down on screaming, fleeing downtown Manhattanites, destroying everything in its terrible path, a shot which looks almost exactly like the World Trade Towers' rubble barreling down on screaming, fleeing downtown Manhattanites.
This leads to a profoundly disturbing question: Do Average Joes really harbor fantasies about the violent destruction of America?
The obvious, censored answer is "yes." And why not? Life is so utterly joyless for most stress-warped Americans that it makes sense they would pay whatever it costs to witness the annihilation of the very source of their slow, dull torture: America. The producers of this movie should be applauded for their entrepreneurship in exploiting this common yet suppressed sentiment.
Before you go calling your local Homeland Security goonsquad, The Day After Tomorrow does offer a couple of safe caveats to its populist bin Laden fantasy. First of all, the only city that apparently gets destroyed in the preview is New York City (indeed the trailer ends with a very Apes-esque shot of the Statue of Liberty's crown frozen in ice, leading one man in the matinee to offer up a Heston-like cry of "Noooooo!"). So in a sense, decent middle-American viewers can assuage their guilty snuff-flick hard-ons by noting that most of the people who bite it are elitist blue-state Democrats.
The movie also covers its ass from the other end. It's none other than global warming that unleashes Gaia's climactic fury. The "underlying message" is, again, good business senseensuring that the movie will not offend the sensibilities of any potential demographic, no matter how fickle or bizarre.
Apart from the death-bukkake that the preview promises, there is the question of whether or not the movie will suck. Gosh, tough question, folks. Put it this way: It's directed by Roland Emmerich, of Godzilla and Independence Day infamy. The box-office success of ID was such an indictment of American culture that it would have inspired Thomas Jefferson to take up arms"Our experiment, gentlemen, is a failureand now, we must exterminate them all " The Day After Tomorrow taps even baser instincts, proving that the enemy lies not outside our borders, but rather, deep inside our coastlines.