The Day After Tomorrow (2004) Critic Reviews

Emmerich does know his way around an action scene -- there's an exciting sequence in which Sam and his buddies run from wolves while looking for meds inside the huge ship that pulls up alongside the library. But he's a master of disaster with no people skills. The characters in The Day After Tomorrow are fantastically stupid.Read the full review

Yes, the movie is profoundly silly. What surprised me is that it's also very scary. The special effects are on such an awesome scale that the movie works despite its cornball plotting.Read the full review

A decent disaster pic comes down to the handful of colorful individuals who will live (or, depending on the prominence of their billing, die), as it has since the days of chewy disaster meatballs like ''The Towering Inferno'' and ''Earthquake.'' And the heaviest lifting in Emmerich's production falls to Dennis Quaid and Jake Gyllenhaal. Read the full review

The story is too silly, too woefully underwritten, to stake a claim on seriousness.Read the full review

The Day After Tomorrow is filled with bad dialogue, stock peril situations, and sketchy character development, but it's a big enough spectacle that those things don't completely derail the film's capacity to be enjoyed.Read the full review

Don't ask whether or not you should take The Day After Tomorrow seriously. Don't take it at all.Read the full review

The spectacle, which is colossal and at times staggering to behold, begins within two minutes of the fade-in and keeps coming until the finish. I thought I'd seen it all. I hadn't.Read the full review

When it comes to weaving personal stories in and out of the special-effects set pieces, the director has the most colossal antitalent since Ed Wood Jr. Read the full review

Despite the clunky bits, "Tomorrow" still manages to deliver the blockbuster goods.Read the full review