Doomsday science fiction -- emphasis, as is only fit and proper, on fiction at the expense of science -- about how global warming brings on a new Ice Age in the northern hemisphere, and in consequence a southward migration that reverses the flow of illegals across the Mexican border. (That consequence, alas, is only a throwaway irony instead of a central plotline.) The accelerated pace of the change -- the already mind-boggling six to eight weeks projected early in the action must soon be revised downward to just seven to ten days, or the duration of a single monstrous storm, a pluperfect storm -- can be taken as poetic license for the urgency of the situation today. To quibble, as some have done, with the accuracy of the science, besides exposing the quibbler as a small-minded square, is simply to get sucked into the promotional campaign of the film and to get sidetracked from the film itself. Sidetracked, that is, from legitimate quibbles with the routineness of the human drama (young love, filial love, paternal love, buddy love, bibliophile love, etc.), or with the diaphanous thinness of the cliffhanger thrills, or with the smoothness and seamlessness of the computer-generated special effects. Smoothness and seamlessness might sound like good things, but in the face of a global catastrophe of this magnitude they lend a facileness, a glibness, even a glee, that trivialize the spectacle. Roland Emmerich, the director also of Independence Day and Godzilla, has not allowed 9/11 to much dampen his destructive high spirits. As long as Jake Gyllenhaal and Emmy Rossum (attractive youngsters, to be sure) stay warm in front of a book-fueled fire at the New York Public Library, and as long as Dennis Quaid (the I-told-you-so scientist and re-prioritizing dad) finds his way to them on snowshoes, the rest of mankind can go merrily to hell. (2004) — Duncan Shepherd
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