Global warming leads to giant destructive storms and a sudden climate shift that freezes a substantial portion of the Northern Hemisphere. Climatologist Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid) fights his way through the blizzard to rescue his son (Jake Gyllenhaal) who is having his own battles in an icy New York city.
L.A. is destroyed by multiple, gigantic tornadoes. New York is submerged and then frozen. And it looks really cool. This is as good as FX gets. If you like destruction, this is the place. Buy the DVD and just run the tidal wave hitting the Statue of Liberty over and over.
There’s a plot that goes with the destruction, most of it pretty silly. Why does Jack Hall walk to New York in the middle of the storm when doing so will not help his son? Why does the government let the only scientist who knows what’s going on leave with his entire staff? Why do the survivors insist on staying in a large library instead of moving to any of hundreds of nearby building that would be easier to keep warm? Why do they keep burning books instead of furniture? The story is filled with typical catastrophe-film clichés, and is just good enough not to distract from the cool look of a ship drifting down the flooded streets of New York. The stranded-teens plotline is engaging and if the ‘Jack Hall and his young-cancer-victim-saving wife’ story is less interesting, there’s always another copter crashing. The pseudo-science sounds better than I had expected, and while no one can seriously claim the events in this film could happen, it does make an environmental/political point through exaggeration, particularly when the Dick Cheney look-alike ignores science in favor of partisan politics.