The Day After Tomorrow: Movie Review, DVD Review, Blu-ray disc Review

If ever there was a movie designed to land at the top of Al Gore’s Netflix list, this is it.

Just out on Blu-ray disc, this global-warming thriller finds mother nature huffing and puffing and blowing the world down. Tokyo is slammed with hail stones, New York City is overcome by a tidal wave, Los Angeles is riddled with tornados.

Folks, Dorothy never had it this bad and she was saddled with a gingham dress, a yapping dog and a wicked witch.

The film’s first 20 minutes are a blast, literally, with director Roland Emmerich having a grand time playing Mother Nature.

Released in 2004, the film was ahead of its time, taking the position that thanks to the atmosphere being littered with greenhouse gases, major climate shifts would alter the earth. In this case, that means plunging it into a new ice age, with the movie focusing on a handful of characters trying to survive the ensuing devastation until the worst is over--you know, the day after tomorrow.

Dennis Quaid, Jake Gyllenhaal, Emmy Rossum and Sela Ward star. All are fine. Better is that while the movie is trash, it isn’t a cheat. It’s fast-paced and entertaining, particularly in its first hour, a film with good window dressing and an ecological heart that makes up for the so-so script grinding away with stock B-movie characters.

Several scenes pack a punch, such as when wolves, newly escaped from a zoo, go on the prowl and then on the attack.

Or the scene that follows, when a deadly blast of sub-arctic air leeches into the city, freezing everything in sight.

Or, best yet, when Americans are shown fleeing illegally across the border into Mexico in an effort to beat the looming deep freeze. It’s the film’s most outrageous, wittiest twist, with our administration promising to forgive all Latin American debt should that country allow us in.

Genius.

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