Mankind faces a new ice age in this special effects extravaganza from Independence Day director Roland Emmerich. Dennis Quaid and Jake Gyllenhaal star Are stupendous special effects and a solid scenario enough to carry a film, when the narrative and dialogue are weak? In the case of Roland Emmerich‘s The Day After Tomorrow, the answer is yes. But only just.

Stories based on the end of civilisation have long been popular. Flood, fire, plague, alien invasion, meteors, comets, sentient machines, even Satan - humanity has been battered by them all for decades thanks to the imaginations of authors and filmmakers.

Director Roland Emmerich is no stranger to mass destruction. His biggest hit (with his then production partner Dean Devlin), 1996‘s Independence Day had nasty aliens knackering the planet until heroic Americans saw them off. He followed that mayhem with some more focused property damage in 1998‘s Godzilla. With The Day After Tomorrow he is once again wreaking destruction on a global scale. Unfortunately, his attempt to portray a worldwide crisis results in a piecemeal story, its narrative drive interrupted by over-ambitious plotting. The hero of the piece is Jack Hall (Quaid), a palaeoclimatologist whose research into the last ice age has revealed some very disturbing data. Natural greenhouse gases caused it, and our own fossil fuel-hungry endeavours may be having the same effect. At a UN conference on global warming (in New Delhi, where it‘s snowing) he tells the massed dignitaries, including the belligerent, righteously ignorant US vice president (Walsh), "If we do not act soon, it will be our children and our grandchildren who pay the price."

He‘s wrong though. Enormous hailstones are already falling on Tokyo and another respected scientist, Brit Terry Rapson (Holm), is noting 13-degree temperature drops at various research buoys in the north Atlantic. Worse still, men aboard the International Space Station are watching "enormous" storm systems build. Freak occurrences increase - Jack‘s son Sam (Gyllenhaal) is visiting New York City, where the sky is filled with hundreds of thousands of birds, while across the continent in LA "multiple tornadoes" hit. The Hollywood sign is "just shredded", as is most of the city. Witnessing all this on a bank of monitors at his lab in Washington, Jack concludes, "I think we‘re on the verge of a major climate shift."

He‘s right. A "wall of water" hits NYC, then the entire northern hemisphere starts to freeze. This action is based on a theory that suggests global warming may actually produce an ice age. The Day After Tomorrow provides a modicum of technical exposition to explain this: the melting ice caps result in a "critical desalination" of the oceans. Storms build as a result of changes in oceanic currents. Superstorms in fact, powerful enough to "pull down supercooled air from the upper troposphere". The devastation hits quickly, and its realisation in the film is far more compelling than the fragmentary story, much of which is hideously mawkish - such as Sam‘s adoration of a fellow student (Rossum), his heroic doctor mum (Ward) refusing to leave the bedside of a kid with cancer, and Rapson and his team displaying British pluck in the face of absolute adversity. ("We‘ve got our own genny [generator]. Enough tea and biscuits to sink a ship. We‘ll be fine."). Most cringeworthy of all is Jack declaration to Sam: "I will come for you! Do you understand me?" There‘s also a sense of certain sequences being bolted on. Sam doesn‘t really have much to do, so his role is enlivened by an attack from some ropey CGI wolves, escaped from a New York zoo.

The film‘s awkward nature is further demonstrated by its uneasy combination of sincere criticism of the unsustainable lifestyle advocated by, chiefly, the Kyoto-shirking US government, alongside a typically cheesy, earnest US patriotism. The heroes of the piece are dedicated, hardworking, all-Americans who pledge loyalty to the flag, even while that flag is freezing stiff thanks to the shortsightedness of those in power.

The Dick Cheney-like vice president is very defensive at best, close-minded at worst, rebuking Hall‘s claims that the climate change theories be taken seriously with a patronising, "Our economy is every bit as fragile as the climate." Jack‘s boss Tom tells him bluntly, "You didn‘t want to hear about science when it could have made a difference" after the (frozen) shit has hit the fan. The vice prez does wise up, but it requires a pretty hefty lesson.

Still, politics aside, The Day After Tomorrow must be commended for it benchmark special effects. Unlike those of Van Helsing, these take the realistic rather than cartoony route. Shots of the freeze progressing down the length of the Empire State Building or a tsumani engulfing the Statue of Liberty (poor old New York, always getting the worst of it) are truly remarkable.