Rated (M) Dennis Quaid, Jake Gyllenhaal, Sela Ward.
Opens nationally May 27

Roland Emmerich has a thing about destruction. Independence Day and, to a lesser extent his whole canon, from Stargate through to the awful Godzilla and The Patriot, is an expert exposition of the slow build/big bang theory of devastation. Emmerich can be relied upon to let the audience know well in advance of the impending destruction — after all you can see the money shots in the trailer.

That said, revelling in the destruction would be just downright mean spirited, and audiences need someone to cheer on through the impending doom. In The Day after Tomorrow, this someone is paleoclimatologist (!) Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid) and his family who are separated when the climate decides to take on a chill for the worst. His prediction of globally more severe weather followed by a new Ice Age, after researching ice core samples in the Antarctic, falls on deaf ears at first. Then, when massive bowling ball sized hail stones pummel Tokyo, tornadoes rip up the Hollywood sign and Manhattan gets a little soggy, the President finally listens (sadly too late for some, but such are the rules of all disaster films). Can Hall make good his promise to sojourning New York-bound son Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal) that whatever happens he'll find him?

Never fear, survival-by-cliche is here.

Disaster movies have always been an implicitly political genre and Emmerich takes his politics seriously — the Kyoto Accord is name-checked in the first five minutes after all. In that sense Emmerich, a European, could not have chosen a better time to land a blow with this well-timed blockbuster.

Emmerich has always cast actors rather than stars, and here he is well served by Quaid spreading grit and gravitas and Gyllenhaal gamely skating the comic margins of the material.

But it's the devastation which has most glued to their seats and this film delivers on all fronts. There are truly unmissable sequences, which have set yet another benchmark for CGI technology. Eerily beautiful scenes of the Manhattan skyline frozen with the Statue of Liberty buried to her chest in ice will not be soon forgotten.

Fortunately for Emmerich, the minutiae of the story is interesting and engrossing enough to stop you questioning some of the more incongruent physics involved, but it's only after this film that the simple "scientific" premise scares you … and shouldn't all disaster films leave you with that niggling feeling.

Adrian Drayton