The Day After Tomorrow

[gpc]

Doveva uscire in 'sti giorni, no?
Qualcuno l'ha visto? Che ne pensate?
Io ho letto questo...:

When Weather (and Science) Goes Bad

By Seth Shostak
SETI Institute
posted: 06:30 am ET
27 May 2004



Let’s face it; a lot of the population west of the Hudson River figures that New York has it coming. And in the latest Hollywood disaster film, The Day After Tomorrow, the Big Apple really takes it on the chin. In a matter of days, the city is converted into an open-air meat locker, as Mother Earth demands payback for decades of environmental abuse.

First, a Noachian rainstorm floods the subways, stalls traffic, and sends residents scrambling up the stairs. Then a tidal wave roars through the city like freshly squeezed Godzilla. The audience shovels popcorn as New York takes a briny bath; but maybe it isn’t so bad -- Gotham could probably use a scouring.

Sure, but that’s just a prelude. The real problem begins when a giant, cyclonic storm system, thousands of miles in size, decks the continent like a white shitake mushroom and burps cold air onto the Northeast. Temperatures plummet, and a NASA researcher exclaims "there’s a temperature drop in New York of 10 degrees per second!" Catch that? Sounds like another NASA units problem. After all, if the mercury really fell that fast, the Big Apple would hit absolute zero within a minute.

But quantitative quibbles aside, it’s a chilling sight to see an ice age hit the northern hemisphere in less time than it takes to freeze a quart of chicken soup. Yes, we know New York has a bulls eye painted on it somewhere: the city has been cinematically victimized by malevolent aliens, wayward rocks, and supersized prehistoric reptiles. A lot of that is nonsense, but The Day After Tomorrow is predicated on the effects of global warming. And let’s be honest here: carbon dioxide levels are rising. This time it’s not bad cosmic karma that’s doing in the Big Apple. It’s SUVs belching their way through the heartland.

So are the ice ages really coming back? Is the island of Manhattan destined to look like it did twelve thousand years ago, suitable only for polar bears and Zamboni machines?

Well, the climatology experts have no problem with the chain of events portrayed in the film, at least up to a point. It happens like this: global warming melts glaciers, which pour more fresh water into the seas. The change in salinity reaches a "tipping point" that disrupts the conveyor belt of ocean currents (including the Gulf Stream) that bring warmth from the equatorial regions to northern latitudes. The weather goes nuts.

Stephen Schneider, a Stanford University climatologist and a scientist who has testified to Congress and several occasionally interested presidents about what could happen, notes that the severity and the suddenness of the film’s malevolent meteorology are offbase. "All our models tell us that this sort of scenario would take 100 years or more to develop, even if global warming continues. And that tidal wave? Where did that come from?"

In other words, it wouldn’t happen that fast, and it wouldn’t be quite so dramatic in the short term. "Sure, the first cold snap could happen soon, but then there might be periods of respite. And don’t worry about overnight ice sheets: glaciers take a thousand years to build up." Furthermore, Schneider says that we’re talking about the possibility of localized bad weather -- the whole Northern Hemisphere isn’t going to suddenly resemble the surface of Europa.

OK, the film may exaggerate a bit. But this is a movie, after all, and director Roland Emmerich is expert at keeping you velcroed to your seat. He’s savvy enough to avoid wasting a lot of setup time on the wobbly science, and gets right to the action. New York suffers the brunt of the front, but even Hollywood is willing to accept some collateral damage. A handful of ugly twisters churn their way through La-La Land, smartly heading for its only major icons: the Capital Records building and the Hollywood sign, invisibly guided by (one assumes) hyperdimensional vortex fields.

As in all good cinema-Sci-fi, there’s plenty of metaphorical theft, too. Emmerich reprises Robert F. Scott’s 1911 trek to the pole when the film’s protagonist (played by Dennis Quaid) tries to rescue his stranded son, snowbound in New York. Another nifty sequence follows the escape of some wolves from the zoo. The shivering lupines are understandably peckish, but show an odd preference for live prey, despite a city knee-deep in frosty human carrion. Maybe they just like hot meals, but in any case the wolves will remind you of marauding velociraptors in Jurassic Park.

There’s also an impressive sequence before Manhattan gets iced, as fourteen zillion seagulls crowd the skies (take your umbrella). This feathery foreshadowing is akin to Macbeth, where the animals behave strangely when the great chain of being has been disrupted. The gulls are like sick, coal mine canaries: the air is going bad.

The action is non-stop, it’s sharp and it’s impressive. True, the plot won’t tax your brain, and the characters aren’t exactly multidimensional. But hooh-hah, that doesn’t matter. You will ruminate all night on the visuals. You will see things on the screen that, well, you better hope you never see. It is the hypnotic beauty of the inconceivably terrible.

Stephen Schneider worries that the exaggerated scenarios and the biblical retribution portrayed in The Day After Tomorrow may encourage the enemies of environmental action to use it as a whipping boy. After all, since the situations depicted in the film are unrealistic, global action to limit automotive and other emissions can be dismissed with a wave and a laugh. Of course, it isn’t like that. One generation -- ours -- really can disrupt the Gulf Stream, and the consequences will last for a millennium.

Those SUV’s have bad juju.

[alphacygni]

io penso che non lo vedro' perche' sono in sciopero

[gpc]

Originariamente inviato da alphacygni
io penso che non lo vedro' perche' sono in sciopero

Anche io in teoria, ma questo mi incuriosiva

[HenryTheFirst]

Io non vedo l'ora di vederlo

[Maxmel]

esce domani... Ci vado e poi te lo dico. difficile farlo il giorno prima no?

[marKolino]

Originariamente inviato da HenryTheFirst
Io non vedo l'ora di vederlo

idem.
mi piacciono i film catastrofici... una bella serata rincoglionito da effetti speciali e suono bomba è quello che ci vuole.

[gpc]

Originariamente inviato da Maxmel
esce domani... Ci vado e poi te lo dico. difficile farlo il giorno prima no?

Avevo capito che usciva il 26...
Ok, non ne becco una

Dai così mi stronchi anche questo

[majin mixxi]

esce domani quindi lo scarico dopodomani

[HenryTheFirst]

Originariamente inviato da gpc
Avevo capito che usciva il 26...
Ok, non ne becco una

Dai così mi stronchi anche questo

Secondo me hai il datario del PC un giorno avanti, non è possibile che ti sbagli sempre

[Maxmel]

Originariamente inviato da gpc
Avevo capito che usciva il 26...
Ok, non ne becco una

Dai così mi stronchi anche questo

E quale altro ho troncato?

[Genjo Sanzo]

Originariamente inviato da majin mixxi
esce domani quindi lo scarico dopodomani

urbani incute proprio terrore, vedo

[gpc]

Originariamente inviato da marKolino
idem.
mi piacciono i film catastrofici... una bella serata rincoglionito da effetti speciali e suono bomba è quello che ci vuole.

Vai qui:
http://www.space.com/php/multimedia/...hp?category=pe
e premi su US Natural Disaster...

[gpc]

Originariamente inviato da majin mixxi
esce domani quindi lo scarico dopodomani

LOL

[gpc]

Originariamente inviato da HenryTheFirst
Secondo me hai il datario del PC un giorno avanti, non è possibile che ti sbagli sempre

Ma nooooo
E' che mi confondo... allora c'era qualche cos'altro che mi interessava il 26... chissà cos'era...
Usciva qualcosa il 26?

[Symbolic]

Originariamente inviato da majin mixxi
esce domani quindi lo scarico dopodomani

venerdi verso mezzanotte gia si trova

[gpc]

Originariamente inviato da Maxmel
E quale altro ho troncato?

Direi che Troy l'hai smontato al 100%

[Maxmel]

cmq i film in sala escono, di solito, il venerdi a parte qualche caso in cui anticipano al giovedi...

[Jaguar64bit]

Originariamente inviato da majin mixxi
esce domani quindi lo scarico dopodomani

.....alla faccia di Urbani , fa pure rima

[Maxmel]

Originariamente inviato da gpc
Direi che Troy l'hai smontato al 100%

A me è piaciuto, credevo di averlo detto...

[HenryTheFirst]

Originariamente inviato da Maxmel
cmq i film in sala escono, di solito, il venerdi a parte qualche caso in cui anticipano al giovedi...

Il giovedì a volte fanno le "antemprime nazionali".
Tipo kill bill per intenderci.