The Day After Tomorrow stars Dennis Quaid as Jack Hall, a climatologist who valiantly battles the furious elements in a desperate attempt to save his...man, who am I kidding?!?! Roland Emmerich and Jeffrey Nachmanoff make it clear this flick is about one thing and one thing only. Destruction. Lots and lots of destruction. How else would you explain this film's "plot", which is about as thin as the ice that Jack and his stereotypically disposable colleagues find themselves on at one point in the movie? It begins promisingly, with Jack meeting some resistance from the US Vice President after telling a UN conference on global warming that we could be in for another ice age "maybe in 100 years, maybe in a 1000". However, thanks to some wacky weather across the globe and the appearance of tornados[!] in L.A., everyone realizes that Jack might've been wrong about the timeframe, but right about the catastrophic events. And since there needs to be some sort of conflict in the flick, and Jack sure as heck can't take on Mother Nature, it just so happens that his son Sam is visiting New York when everything hits the fan. And once Jack gets word that Sam's alive, he heads to NY to find and rescue his son before the super, ultra, mega-freeze hits.

Though Jack shares a brief scene with both Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal) and his wife (Sela Ward) at the very beginning of the film, it's not clear if the relationships are strained or what. There's also a half-assed potential love triangle between Gyllenhaal, Emmy Rossum and Austin Nichols that gets tossed aside almost as quickly as Nichols' younger brother (which was probably just a convenient excuse needed to get the characters out into the weather) and is never mentioned again. In retrospect, I wasn't really expecting a probing character study, I just wanted to see stuff get destroyed. It did, and I was completely satisfied. With the exception of one particular sequence, the special effects (by nine different houses!) in this movie are fantastic. From the destruction in L.A. to the moments when the deep freeze crystallizes structures and humans alike, the effects were extremely lifelike and the effects houses definitely earned their money.

Besides the movie, disc one also contains two audio commentaries, one with director Roland Emmerich and producer Mark Gordon, the other with co-writer Jeffrey Nachmanoff, director of photography Ueli Steiger, editor David Brenner and production designer Barry Chusid.

There's additional material not contained in the barebones release on the second disc. It's divided into five different categories:

• Previsualization - Karen Goulekas, a visual effects supervisor, hosts this 5m 9s featurette. She shows viewers how directors plan out complicated action sequences or visual effects shots. In essence, it's a 3-D storyboard.
• Pre-Production Meeting - A 6m 46s featurette that lets viewers get a look at a Roland and other members of the crew brainstorming in Montreal, Canada on November 1, 2002. Not terribly interesting.
• Storyboard Gallery - A series of still images from the storyboard. They're broken up into specific scenes.
• Concept Art Gallery - Another series of still images, this time showing conceptual art. There was a cool chopper pic that I didn't notice in the flick.

• "Two Kings And A Scribe: A Filmmaking Conversation" - This 48m 22s widescreen documentary, directed by James Christie Walker, follows Emmerich, Mark Gordon and Nachmanoff as they make the film. It was slightly interesting to see how a movie gets made, but I wouldn't watch this more than once. And i'm also curious why it's not anamorphic.

• Pushing the Envelope: Visual Effects - Since the special effects were my favorite aspect of this movie, I found this to be the most interesting featurette. It surprise me to find out it took nine effects houses to make this film. I was even more shocked that ILM was responsible for what I thought was the weakest special effect of the film.
• Scoring - Since I think a good score can help make or break a film, I thought this was an interesting featurette. Basically, we see the orchestra playing while a small screen shows what part of the movie they're scoring.
• Audio Anatomy - "The Final Mix" shows viewers how they mix all the elements of the film, nature sounds, vocals, score, etc, into one cohesive track. There's also a "Interactive Demo" that has 8 tracks of audio which you can isolate to show you the several layers that make up one scene.
• Deleted Scenes - There are ten deleted scenes of varying length. You're also given the option of watching them with commentary from Emmerich and Gordon.

• "the Force Of Destiny: the Science And Politics Of Climate Change" - Remember back in high school when they'd show you those movies whose job it was to scare you "straight"? Well, keeping the recent meteorological events happening around the world in mind, this scared the hell out of me. It shows us how we, as humans, are running our environment into the ground with a quickness. Lemme tell you, this 1h 19s film will have you recycling, using gel instead of hairspray and looking into carpooling before the credits roll. Also, it's not anamorphic.

• There's also two trailers and a teaser for the Day After Tomorrow, and trailers for Alien Quadrilogy, Alien Vs Predator and Man On Fire

Video: The Day After Tomorrow is presented in an anamorphic 2.35:1 ratio. The picture is extremely sharp and looked great. While the film doesn't give the entire color spectrum a workout, what colors were on screen were very rich.

Audio: The Day After Tomorrow features two english soundtracks - 5.1 Dolby Digital Surround, 5.1 dts, as well as French and English 2.0 Dolby Surround. I viewed the film with the dts track in full effect and, particularly whenever Mother Nature struck, it gave all my speakers quite the workout. I was quite happy with the presentation. I did give the 5.1 DD track a brief listening to, but I found the dts track to be more dramatic. There are also subtitles in English and Spanish, and it's captioned as well.


So what'd ya think?: Regardless of the disposable characters and plots in this movie, I really dug it. Again, the special effects are fantastic, the actors (Quaid, in particular) are likeable and its two hour running time passes by pretty quickly. If anything, I would hope this film, and the excellent "the Force Of Destiny: the Science And Politics Of Climate Change" documentary, will make viewers contemplate the environment and their responsibility to it.

I would also like to take this moment to reprimand FOX for re-releasing these flicks so soon after the initial barebones releases. Sure, other studios do it. However, since "the Day After Tomorrow", "I, Robot" and "Man On Fire" were all released with extra content in other regions simultaneously, it's inconceivable that FOX would consciously screw the consumer like this. Perhaps if they had taken the time to issue a press release stating another version was to follow, like New Line did with "Lord Of the Rings", it might not be so bad. I didn't have a chance to catch "the Day After Tomorrow" in movie theatres, so I was eager to buy it when it was first released. However, I also frequent the (pardon the plug) DVD Talk forums and, besides getting info on the other region releases and noticing that there was much more on them, one of our members gave us a heads up to let us know that FOX might have something in store, so I waited. I'm glad I did. I thought the movie itself would warrant a "recommended" rating, but the extra documentaries and featurettes make this a Highly Recommended release.