Anvilicious: We don't know if you noticed, but GLOBAL WARMING IS BAD. Also, the newscast about Americans crossing the border into Mexico — illegally. Yeah.
While real-life climatologists were glad to see the subject of climate change and global warming getting attention from Hollywood, they've expressed concern that the film's inaccurate and heavily sensationalized depiction of climate change might desensitize audiences to the reality of the issue.
This is especially troubling to a number of environmentalists as even serious discussions of climate change often go off the deep end in descriptions (claims of the poles melting overnight, our children never seeing snow) when the reality is that it will consist of single-digit changes in global average temperature with increased risk of extreme weather (such as the 2019 polar vortex in North America and the preceding years' of extreme heat in America, along with low-lying islands being severely threatened by rising sea levels)... but nowhere even remotely near as extreme of Fridge Logical depictions in the film.
Dr. Terry Rapson can count too, thanks to being played by the late Ian Holm.
Esoteric Happy Ending: The astronaut at the end (after the disaster has destroyed civilization in the northern hemisphere and claimed countless lives) who happily declares that he's never seen the sky so clean. Apparently, this is supposed to be the ending's "uplifting" note. Hoo, boy...!
The movie bases its premise on the next Ice Age being caused by global warming. The record cold winter of late 2009-early 2010 was pinned on global warming by some climatologists. It's known that global warming can cause a reduction in temperatures in the north, just not anywhere nearly as cold and fast as in the movie.
Depends on which end of the political spectrum you're on, but the Vice President's comment about meeting with the head of FEMA as the film was released a year before Hurricane Katrina, a historical hurricane that needs no explaining its damage.
In an eerie real-life coincidence to the film, a reporter covering tornadoes in LA was hit and killed by a flying billboard. A year later, Anderson Cooper was almost decapitated by a flying sign while covering Hurricane Dennis.
It's been debated whether the North American Cold Wave of 2013-2014 was due to climate change (general conclusion: impossible to prove either way but it's a natural event that could have easily happened multiple times in the past without us knowing it), but many of the worst effects were uncomfortably reminiscent of the events depicted in the film.
Even more uncomfortably-so, now that 2014-2015 is seeing Boston buried even worse than Buffalo got it last winter.
And the film's second act; consisting of New York City being flooded by tidal waves has become rather chilling with Hurricane Sandy rolling through the area and causing floods for real.
Tornadoes touched down briefly in Southern California in January 2010 and a similar instance would occur again 13 years later in March of 2023.
In fall 2017, mere months after the aforementioned iceberg twice the size of Rhode Island broke off, North and Central America were battered by a series of hurricanes — Harvey, Katia, Irma, with Jose just missing the continent. The latter three were all active simultaneously for a time, bearing an eerie resemblance to the map Jack produces of the projected path of the storms.
There was quite a bit of only-half-joking Gallows Humor related to the film in Texas and neighboring states in February of 2021 when a bizarre temporary shift in air currents disturbingly similar to the one in the movie wrought havoc in the region. For comparison, in Central Texas average daily high temperatures of roughly 60F(15C) and lows around 43F(6C) are the rule during winter and early spring, and more than a day or two with daily low temperatures below 32F (0C) is unheard of. In this event, temperatures plunged to around 5F(-20C) and remained below 20F(-6C) for nearly a week, and an area where fraction-of-an-inch dustings of snow are a cause for excitement saw persistent coverage measured in feet. Society effectively experienced a brief local apocalypse as infrastructure completely unprepared for the conditions broke down- natural gas power plants shut down one by one as fuel pipes froze and burst and smaller coal plants quickly exhausted reserves as rail and road transport ground to halt, leaving the state limping by on the combination of more reliable solar, wind, and nuclear plants, and a handful of large coal plants with deeper reserves. As a final touch, more that a few people with the means did in fact flee to Mexico as in the film, most infamously Senator Ted Cruz, noted opponent of refugee immigration and infrastructure spending.
Heartwarming Moments: Laura doubling back during the deluge of New York City to help rescue a French mother and her child (who were trapped in a taxi by the waters and couldn't understand what the cop trying to help them was saying since they didn't speak English). And Sam runs back to retrieve her when the tidal wave arrives. No wonder the pair fell in love after that.
Hilarious in Hindsight: After disaster strikes, the border between the USA and Mexico is closed and refugees are forcibly turned away. Only it's the Mexicans who have closed the border and are forcibly preventing desperate and destitute Americans from crossing.
As this video demonstrates, most of the Northern Hemisphere has become an Arctic wasteland, all surviving Americans have gone to Mexico, which won't be able to hold them all, leading to either an American uprising or Martial Law. Canada, Europe, and Russia are all stated or shown to have suffered a similar fate to the one depicted in the US, only worse (because they're further north). Europe is implied to have got hit particularly hard, as south for them would be the Mediterranean, so they were basically trapped. India and China aren't really mentioned but India at least (and parts of China) are probably far south enough to have escaped turning into an ice cube. So that's goodbye Europe (740 million), Russia (130 million), and Canada and most of the USA (call it 250 million?), plus an unknown amount of people in Asia and the victims of all the typhoons and tsunami around the world. It's not (quite) the end of the world, but you're looking at a death toll of at least a billion, possibly closer to 2 billion, with everything north of about 35' latitude now about as hospitable as the North Pole on a bad day.
And then you consider that the above list includes most of the world's core agricultural regions...
Potentially the fate of the astronauts trapped upon the International Space Station, though there are a number of alternate landing sites for the Shuttle, some in the southern hemisphere. Their families, on the other hand...
Even if there are millions of survivors they wouldn't survive for very long in arctic conditions. And in reality there simply aren't enough rescue choppers to take all of them to warmer places no matter what the movie tries to imply at the end.
Hey, our heroes survived just by staying indoors and huddling close to a fire. Who's to say there aren't millions of survivors?
It does show in the ending that the helicopters were picking up more survivors on the rooftops of New York after they picked up the main characters, so at least the main characters weren't the only survivors of the disaster in New York. So they aren't totally dismissing the possibility that there are other possible survivors.
On a more sobering note, stills from the movie were dredged up once again during Hurricane Ida in 2021, with people comparing the cinematic flood to the real-life disaster occurring in New York at the time; many found the similarities uncanny.
The Day After Tomorrow was right.Explanation With each passing year in real life where the problems with climate change on Earth get worse and worse, it increases the amount of people who can't help but point to this movie that it tried to warn us that something like this would eventually happen.
Narm: At one point, the characters start trying to outrun the cold weather. Not only that, the cold weather is following them.
Older Than They Think: A Hollywood film from 1933(!!) called Deluge had a similar gimmick about rapid worldwide climate shifts unleashing global catastrophes, and the film's major scene also features New York City being flooded by the titular "deluge", but just after getting destroyed by a Special Effect Failure-quality earthquake — see it here. A comparison video of the flooding scenes from Deluge and The Day After Tomorrow was even put up.
Special Effect Failure: The only visual downside in the movie is the CGI wolves which, for the most part, lack detail/complexity in their rendering. But there are still some moments where the wolves look great, such as the shots of them walking/running through the stairs.
Strawman Has a Point: Dennis Quaid's character shouldn't be believed carte blanche, because the scientific community isn't in agreement with him. Whereas global warming is believed by all scientists, in this universe only one person believes in global warming as Dennis Quaid does. The scientific method is that a lot of scientists have to agree on something through peer review for it to be good policy.
Suspiciously Similar Song: The theme when Sam, Brian, and J.D. go inside the Russian ship to look for medicine for Laura's leg sounds exactly like the main theme from Panic Room.
Frank's Heroic Sacrifice, literally taking the fall so that his friends survive to reach Sam in New York.
The deaths of the survivors in the library who chose to risk the storm to escape the city. And the worst part is, they almost certainly would've survived if they had heeded Sam's warnings.
Unintentionally Unsympathetic: A minor point, but showing your work is a standard requirement in virtually all math courses starting in at least as early as high school, usually sooner. Either Sam didn't bother to check the instructions, or he thought that the rules didn't apply to him.
Visual Effects of Awesome: Being one of the first films to depict photoreal computer-generated weather on a massive scale, The Day After Tomorrow is fondly remembered today for its special effects. The storm surge scene is well-regarded in particular, with convincing CG water flowing through and interacting with a digital replica of Lower and Midtown Manhattan.
Suddenly, "It's the size of Rhode Island!" seems less silly.