I made a promise to my son, and I'm going to keep it. I'm Dennis Quaid.

The Day After Tomorrow is super cheesy. There is, for example, a lot of screen time devoted to characters smiling back and forth at one another. This is in lieu of development, which, to be honest, you don't really miss. The characters are such cliches (Dennis Quaid is the scientist who is estranged from his son) that if they spent any more time on them, the movie would crash to a flaming halt. In fact, the first half hour is spent introducing characters only to kill them within the scene. This is good fun.

The rest of the movie is the remaining characters avoiding or gawking at weather phenomena. Tornadoes, hurricanes, hail, flooding, snow, this movie has it all. But suppose you don't like weather-related disasters, suppose you're a big fan of computer-animated wolf-attack-related disasters; This is still the movie for you. And supposing, for the moment, that you don't really care for disasters at all. The Day After Tomorrow has also got its bald-child-chemo-patient, yuppie-romantic-rivalry, infected-leg-wound and homeless-guy-with-dog bases covered.

Roland Emmerich would have done well to play up the apocalypse aspects of the film. As it is it kind of plays like a beefed up version of Twister, it could do to be a little more like Mad Max*. It also didn't need such an upbeat ending. We, the audience, can handle a downer. At least it didn't go out like Van Helsing.

They crack out the morals pretty heavy at the end (we get it, this movie is about global warming), but the real lesson is clear: in the event of a semi-apocalyptic natural disaster, salvation is the public library.

* The correct answer is that every movie should be more like Mad Max.