Jake Gyllenhaal’s 22-year-old disaster thriller makes an unexpected comeback on Netflix
Ah, the good old Noughties, when Hollywood was absolutely hell-bent on ending the world. No, seriously, what was going on? We had The Core, where Earth’s core decided to stop spinning, and War of the Worlds, where Tom Cruise was running for his life from aliens. And now, one of those disaster movies is back on the Netflix charts, a whole 22 years after terrifying us with the weather.
Yep, we’re talking about Roland Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow, starring Dennis Quaid and a baby-faced Jake Gyllenhaal! The film has just returned to Netflix on November 1st, and the viewers didn’t miss a single chance to hop on. By November 3rd, it’s already entered the Top 10 chart.
Coming to the plot, Quaid plays Jack Hall, a climatologist who is going desperate, trying to warn the American government that a massive climate catastrophe is coming. And does anyone listen? Well, you know the answer to that because why take the scientist seriously when you can just wait for Mother Nature to turn the entire planet into a disaster zone?
Meanwhile, his son Sam, played by Gyllenhaal, goes to New York for an academic competition, and as warned, the weather becomes erratic, and poor Sam ends up trapped inside a library while his dad attempts to rescue him through a frozen wasteland. And there’s also a young Emmy Rossum playing Laura, Sam’s love interest, who’s caught up in all the chaos alongside him.
Emmerich went all out on this movie and decided to pick the last stage of haywire, as he first sent a gigantic tidal surge crashing through Manhattan. And if that wasn’t enough, he then froze the entire city solid.
Now, is the science believable? Erm… not exactly. Climatologists have spent years pointing out that the movie’s fast climate changes aren’t realistic. But come on! Were we really watching this in 2004 for an educational climate lecture? Absolutely not! We wanted complete destruction, and boy, did it deliver!
The movie made over $550 million worldwide, and sure, some of that dialogue is a little questionable today. But the scare? Still pretty fabulous!
So, now that The Day After Tomorrow is having its big Netflix comeback, why not give it another watch? Because nobody did it better than the Noughties!