June 01, 2004

Day After Tomorow

Julian thinks the Day After Tomorrow is a howler:

But the effect is not to deliver some kind of chilling, potentially mobilizing warning about the perils of our current environmental policy. Instead, the fantastic and sudden global catastrophe turns a genuine issue into a sci-fi threat: It puts global warming in roughly the same category as attacks by Godzilla or The Blob. In the film's context, a debunking of the film's "bad science" comes off like one of the Comic Book Guy's cavils about the use of polarity-reversal on a Star Trek episode, or a fervent insistence that radioactive spider bites are not, in fact, likely to imbue people with a quasi-psychic danger sense. In short, the movie makes a genuine (if tractable) problem into high camp. It's about as likely to spur political pressure for more environmental regulation as the X-Files movie was to prompt demands for an alien invasion defense force.

Or earthquakes! We need nuclear forces on guard to prevent earthquakes!

Posted by wasylik at June 1, 2004 08:29 AM | TrackBack
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