The Day After Tomorrow Review

Are stupendous special effects and a solid scenario enough to carry a film, when the narrative and dialogue are weak? In the case of Roland Emmerich's The Day After Tomorrow, the answer is yes. But only just.

Stories based on the end of civilisation have long been popular. Flood, fire, plague, alien invasion, meteors, comets, sentient machines, even Satan - humanity has been battered by them all for decades thanks to the imaginations of authors and filmmakers.

Director Roland Emmerich is no stranger to mass destruction. His biggest hit (with his then production partner Dean Devlin), 1996's Independence Day had nasty aliens knackering the planet until heroic Americans saw them off. He followed that mayhem with some more focused property damage in 1998's Godzilla. With The Day After Tomorrow he is once again wreaking destruction on a global scale. Unfortunately, his attempt to portray a worldwide crisis results in a piecemeal story, its narrative drive interrupted by over-ambitious plotting.