Roland Emmerich's The Day After Tomorrow is currently the third most-watched film on Netflix worldwide. The film, like the rest of Emmerich's work, is questionable. Released in 2004, The Day After Tomorrow was an early statement in the ongoing fight about climate change. Though it was bold to take on the issue two years before An Inconvenient Truth, scientists remain divided on its presentation. The film remains in the public eye, but it's more complicated than it needs to be.
The Day After Tomorrow is an adaptation of The Coming Global Superstorm, a fascinating scientific novel from 1999. The book switches between nuanced takes on potential disasters and brief fictional dramatizations of what could happen. Those short stories became the basis of The Day After Tomorrow. Roland Emmerich essentially took the concept of The Coming Global Superstorm, added a few new scenarios, and brought it to the big screen. It quickly became the sixth-highest grossing film of 2004. Critics were less impressed, but that's the default state of Emmerich's filmography. Scientists delivered a variety of responses, but the eventual consensus lands somewhere on the positive side. Perhaps depicting climate change in the language of a disaster movie was necessary to wake people up, but it also created some silly expectations. Honestly, I think it might hold up better today than it did when it came out.
The works of Roland Emmerich tend to follow familiar patterns. He makes disaster movies with stakes so severe that they circle back to being silly. Emmerich has destroyed more iconic landmarks than erosion. Every promotional image for The Day After Tomorrow depicts the destruction of the Statue of Liberty. Looking back at his filmography reveals several enormous hits and misses. Two years ago, Emmerich put out Moonfall, an embarrassing waste of time with almost no redeeming qualities. My least favorite film of Emmerich's is Anonymous, in which he explores his belief that William Shakespeare didn't write any of the plays he wrote. Emmerich is at his best when he's blowing things up without a second thought. He might be getting worse as he ages. If you need to lose any respect you had for the mind behind Independence Day, read his response to criticisms of his Stonewall movie.
The Day After Tomorrow might be one of Roland Emmerich's best films, but it probably earned Netflix success through other means. 20 years after the film hit theaters, we've all grown sick of the conversation it was supposed to start. The film forced us all to consider an issue we weren't talking about, but it also let us console ourselves with the knowledge that it couldn't be that bad. Now, after decades of knowing what will go wrong and doing very little about it, it's a little easier to imagine a new ice age breaking out over a few hours. There are worse movies about climate change. There are far worse Roland Emmerich movies.