Seven Oaks Magazine.

In 1962 Rachel Carson terrified many North Americans, and launched the modern environmental movement, with her depiction of natural wonder ruined, Silent Spring. Concerned with the effects of rampant use of pesticides, Carson envisioned a horrible scene. She recounted towns throughout America, in which the ravages of a human population dedicated to exploiting wildlife and nature had massacred the flora and fauna that once populated the country. She wrote, “a grim specter has crept upon us almost unnoticed,” and promised to explain what had “already silenced the voices of spring in countless towns in America.”

For Carson, the model of environmental destruction was one of disappearance, of decline, ultimately one best explained with a silent spring, bereft of its natural beauty. She used this model in an attempt to shock complacent Westerners out of their consumptive ways, and to impress upon them the consequences of their wanton environmental disregard. Roland Emmerich’s new film, The Day After Tomorrow, clearly sets out with a similar goal in mind. But in contrast to Carson, Emmerich’s world ends not with a whimper but a bang, an ice age that sets in in a matter of a week. As the film opens on cracking ice, and as its earliest scenes depict Los Angeles being literally blown away by tornadoes, the film portrays the arrival of a natural armageddon unlike anything Carson, or likely any other scientist, could ever imagine. For Emmerich, as much as for Carson, however, the method by which they predict this holocaust shapes and limits their analysis to some extent, and in Emmerich’s case turns a powerful, if moralistic, premise into a struggle to the death between forces that need not actually be opposed.

The film’s premise is reasonably simple. Emmerich appears to have taken predictions of the effects of global warming, and accelerated their arrival on Earth from decades to mere days. In this scenario, the polar ice caps melt and temperatures in the North Atlantic drop 13 degrees over night. This causes worldwide devastation, as unusual weather systems form all over the globe. The Northern hemisphere is the most disrupted, though, when hurricane-like storms form over land, and deliver sudden flooding and then sudden frost to everything north of the 40 th parallel. Ample computer graphics, powerfully realized on the big screen, depict the mammoth destruction at a pace that stuns the audience and hurries the film along. Within all of this, a small group of characters, featuring prominently a paleo-climatologist (who knew that would ever be the profession of an action hero), struggle to keep their family together despite nature’s apparent determination to separate them.

Although the central story of the film is the struggle for Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid) to re-unite with his son Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal), the struggle of human versus nature echoes a larger conceit within the film. The power of the special effects, and the violence of some of the weather changes, casts the environment as a character, one of the most vicious villains in film history. Jack Hall’s pseudo-science, couched in an enormous amount of expository dialogue, tries to explain that the arrival of a new ice age is simply the earth righting itself after centuries of exploitation by humans. Scenes in which Sam is chased by wolves or the encroaching frost, however, cast the global environmental re-alignment clearly in the role of antagonist. In one memorable scene, a librarian at the Manhattan public library, where the heroes hideout, protects a Gutenberg bible from the bonfire they’ve started to keep themselves warm. He explains that, in his mind, the printed word is Western civilization’s greatest achievement. Thus, if these weather cycles intend to destroy western civilization, he’s going to take a small piece with him into the future. The conflict within the film escalates from a struggle for one family to be together in the face of frightening odds, to a struggle for all of Western civilization against the rampaging forces of nature wronged (we’ll leave aside, as the film does, what is happening in Asia and the South).

The Day After Tomorrow is a limited but interesting success. Its best feature is clearly its amazing special effects, which provide a powerful political vehicle for Emmerich’s vision of a nightmare avenging earth. Unfortunately, the political vision Emmerich entered with has limited the possibilities of the film’s environmental message. By casting the earth and humans in a constant state of conflict, he has limited the very real power of a film with this sort of budget. Just as Carson did far more subtly, Emmerich has created an impossible conundrum for his audience. Humans are the destroyers of Emmerich’s earth – there is no distinguishing between good and bad practices. Ultimately, it is governments, as encapsulated by a Dick Cheney look-alike vice president, who have failed to heed scientists’ warnings. And when things go bad, they go very bad, as the earth seems to be determined to wipe the blight that is humanity off of its surface. Of course, this model cannot succeed –humans are an integral part of the environment. While clearly behaviour must be reformed to prevent global disaster, there is no way that humanity can ever improve as long as the environment is understood as an adversary. For this reason, Emmerich’s moralistic crusade against greenhouse gases is politically very limited, even if it is filmically terrifyin