The Day After Tomorrow/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Anvilicious: Everything about global warming aside, everything involving burning the books in the library is about as subtle as being smacked upside the head with a Gutenberg bible.
  • Bellisario's Maxim: Emmerich has stated that the film was never intended to be scientifically accurate - the credits claim it was based on the book The Coming Global Superstorm, by Art Bell and Whitney Striber.
  • Critical Research Failure / Did Not Do the Research: Subverted. While the movie is routinely mocked for gross inaccuracies in climatology, Roland Emmerich has stated multiple times that this movie was not intended to accurately depict realistic climate change or the effects of global warming. It's just a disaster flick, you should really just relax.
  • Don't Shoot the Message: While real-life climatologists were glad to see the subject of climate change and global warming getting attention from Hollywood, they've expressed concern that the film's depiction of climate change might desensitize audiences to the reality of the issue.
  • Fridge Brilliance: The moral of the film becomes more tolerable when you realize that it's not saying that Global Warming is going to turn the world into a wasteland in an absurdly short period of time, but it's actually saying that Global Warming is happening faster than we think.
  • Fridge Logic: Several places -- for example, the Heroic Sacrifice in the mall.
    • If the President had just stayed where he was, he could have lived.
    • Alright, dad, so when you get to the library that your son or son's corpse may or may not be at, what are you going to do?
    • "Yeah, guys, let's burn all of these books, which could very well contain the only human knowledge left on this world, instead of the thick wooden furniture, which would burn longer and leave less smoke!"
      • In all fairness they were burning only the books that had no relevance to future civilization (such as the US tax code, and copies of outdated municipal records), but that's still no excuse for trying to heat a building by burning paper instead of wood.
  • Funny Aneurysm Moment / Hilarious in Hindsight: The movie bases its premise on the next Ice Age being caused by global warming. The record cold winter of late '09 / early '10 was pinned on global warming by some climatologists. It's known that global warming can cause a reduction in temperatures in the north, just not anywhere nearly as cold and fast as in the movie.
    • Tornadoes touched down briefly in Southern California in January 2010.
  • Just Here for Godzilla: Fans of movies featuring large-scale destruction were interested for the cities getting smashed, and often did their best to ignore the muddled and nonsensical moralizing. It's even been described as "A really good kaiju movie with invisible kaiju."
  • Special Effects Failure: The CGI wolves are awful. And the fact that Industrial Light and Magic of all companies did them only makes it 10 times worse.
  • Unfortunate Implications: The global freezing stops at political frontiers.
  • Wall Banger: Enough for a page of their own.
Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/The_Day_After_Tomorrow/YMMV?oldid=1987083"