If it's not a blast of fire threatening innocent bystanders like in Independence Day, it's a flood of water in an Emmerich epic.

“We would do all of the screens in a specific environment, to make it look like an official place that monitored weather,” Williams says. “If there were news reporters that were also integral to the story, we would shoot those reporters telling the story — we would write the script for them and approve it through production, and the director, and that way create the mock newscasts. It’s sort of like filling out that middle world.”

Weather effects were done utilizing elements from the effects vendors, or created using Maya, After Effects and Photoshop, among others. “We had to make things realistic but also look cool, because the screens cover story points--almost like secondary characters. So it was really important that we made them realistic but exaggerated them in way that was still believable.”

We have to wait and see if a post-9/11 disaster flick will chill audiences at the box office. Image by ILM.

Finale: An Apt Story for Our Times
Colin Strause realizes that the film is mainly intended to entertain, but with a knowing laugh he acknowledges all the environmental and political press the film has attracted.

One has to wonder about the film coming now — conceived after 9/11, and released during the Iraq war. Do people want to be simply scared by a vicarious experience of disaster, or do they wish, after years of paranoia brought on by terrorist threats and environmental warnings, to cheer on the final destruction of the world not by meteor or other natural event, but by events made inevitable by their own behavior? I think the second is what attracts perverse interest and delight — the idea that, yes, we are not ants, we have the power to destroy our world — and we are doing so! The film has attracted considerable attention. Environmentalists cheering its forecast of disaster, while folks in the opposite camp say that the weather changes in the film would take 200 years, and not just two weeks, to occur — as if this excuses the continuation of planetary exploitation.

I predict something simpler — that until the release of Spider-Man 2, Day After Tomorrow will reign at the box office. Day After Tomorrow is the most significant American popular film of the last decade. As either a foreboding spectacle of left wing prophecy, or fatalistic approbation of right wing conquest, it trumpets the message of our sick times like a flatulent clarion call blown from the bowels of a devil in a painting by Hieronymus Bosch.

Henry Turner is a writer and award-winning filmmaker, whose Lovecraft-inspired horror feature, Wilbur Whateley, won top awards at the Chicago International Film Festival. His writing on film has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, L’ecran Fantastique, Variety and many other publications. A longtime film festival executive, he has programmed for the Slamdance Film Festival, and currently heads FilmTraffick L.A.