Every day, AlloCiné recommends a film to (re)watch on TV. Tonight: Roland Emmerich films the end of the world.
With Independence Day (1996), then Godzilla (1998), director Roland Emmerich established himself as the master of Hollywood disaster film. In 2004, he drove the point home by throwing a chill in dark rooms with The Day After. After an alien invasion and a giant lizard, the filmmaker confronts the earth’s population with a new ice age.
Based on the book “The Great Climate Disruption” (“The Coming Global Superstorm” in original version) by Art Bell and Whitley Strieber published in 1999, The Day After shows gigantic devastation – floods, hail, tornadoes and temperatures of unprecedented magnitude – due to violent climatic upheavals. We thus retain several spectacular sequences such as the incredible scene of the tsunami engulfing New York or its municipal library buried under the ice.
In addition to these impressive visual effects, rewarded with a prize by the British Academy Film Awards, The Day After Incorporates a human and intimate dimension through the relationship of the main characters. Indeed, we follow the climatologist Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid) who seeks to save his son Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal) in danger of death. By thus dealing with the universal fight of Man against the natural elements, Roland Emmerich reveals a more unknown and emotional facet of his work, interviewed a few years earlier in The Patriot and which we will then find in Anonymous.
The Day After by Roland Emmerich with Jake Gyllenhaal, Dennis Quaid, Emmy Rossum…
Tonight on TMC at 9:25 p.m.
