A Feel-Good Disaster Movie

A Feel-Good Disaster Movie
Call it the Giant Switch Theory: At some point, global warming will send enough polar ice slush into the ocean to turn off the flow of warm air and water. In a flash, weather around the Earth will turn monstrous -- killer tornadoes in Los Angeles, super tsunamis in Manhattan and football-sized ice chunks dropping from the sky in Tokyo.

Though scientists might not buy this theory -- especially the in-a-flash part -- Hollywood sure has. Fox's $125 million The Day After Tomorrow is built on the idea that global warming could explode into global disaster at any moment.

Such a scenario is scary to imagine -- scarier, certainly, than those of other disaster movies. Earthquakes and twisters are too localized, aliens and giant spiders too ludicrous. But global warming is something the scientific community speaks with near-unanimity about. Cataclysmic change, many will tell you, is on the way, be it next year or in a millennium or two.

That's not to accuse The Day After Tomorrow of being a responsible environmental text. It's a Hollywood blockbuster -- brash, dazzling and, beneath its "science," quite silly.

The film opens with a scan of bad weather around the world -- mega-hail in Japan, blizzards in New Delhi and ceaseless rain in New York.