When the climate shifts due to our incessant global warming, and the polar ice caps melt causing the tidal flow to cool and throw the Northern Hemisphere into an almost instantaneous ice age, you have the ingredients for a disaster movie on a major scale. Now, when we think of classic disaster movies, we often bring up the classics, like “Towering Inferno” and “The Poseidon Adventure;” disasters taking place within a specific location such as a building or a ship. Other films focusing on natural disasters like “Earthquake” or “Volcano,” focus on a specific area where the disaster takes place.

“The Day After Tomorrow” takes the disaster to a new level, throwing one-half of the earth into an arctic nightmare practically overnight. Unfortunately, when you take the disaster to that large of a scale as Director Roland Emmerich (“Godzilla”) has done, you lose out on the ability to feel a connection, or pity, for a relatively small group of people. Instead of the action centering on a building, a town, or even a coast, the fact that one-half of the world’s population is about to be wiped out is not something that can be overlooked. This is how it seems Emmerich has chosen to look at the event, by focusing on a group of four students, two adults and a homeless man trapped in New York and how they struggle to survive.

Sure, it’s an interesting location to unleash the natural disaster of a tidal wave overtaking New York’s famous skyline, then freezing over and becoming a winter wasteland of frozen bodies. Even unleashing tornadoes over Hollywood is a fun concept, but what about other locations? To have the film focus on a group of seven in New York seems too small a scale compared to the billions around the world struggling to survive.

On a grand scale, the film tries to overachieve, and falls flat. Sure, the special effects are fun to watch, but they have all already been seen on the trailer. Just because they are larger on a theater screen doesn’t mean it’s worth the price of admission.