OFFICIAL WM MOVIE REVIEW….As part of my, um, research duties for the Washington Monthly I went to see The Day After Tomorrow this afternoon, and I have to say that it’s probably the best movie Roland Emmerich has ever made. Thomas Hibbs at NRO doesn’t agree:
It is infected by simpleminded Hollywood dualisms: scientists and homeless guys ? good, Republican politicians ? bad.
Now why does he think all the politicians in the film are Republicans? It’s true that they are uniformly unctious, supercilious, oblivious, and hardhearted, but why does that make him think they’re Republicans?
But where Hibbs really screws up is his assertion that the movie “pales by comparison to Emmerich’s 1996 summer hit, Independence Day.” Puh-leeze. I mean, Day After Tomorrow may have had a dumb plot, but at least it had a plot. And it didn’t rely on aliens having adopted ISO standards for computer transmissions.
Hibbs is also annoyed that the movie had a happy ending. Jeez, what did he want? By the looks of things, a couple of billion people died, but at least the hero’s son, the homeless guy’s dog, and New York’s Gutenberg Bible survived. I don’t know that I’d really call that happy, but I guess a conservative might. Funny people, conservatives.
