May 27, 2004 |  Los Angeles has been razed by multiple tornadoes. New Delhi has been blanketed with a phenomenal snowfall. Tokyo has been pummeled by hailstones that David Letterman might describe as the size of canned hams. Manhattan, already flooded by a mammoth tidal wave, is slowly but surely freezing over because of a precipitous temperature drop.

But even as world populations dwindle during The Day After Tomorrow , and even as The Weather Channel issues dire warnings that tomorrow's forecast includes the arrival of new Ice Age, 17-year-old Sam Hall (Jake Gyllenhaal) remains focused on something far more important. Never mind that he's stuck with a handful of other folks inside the New York Public Library, reduced to burning books to keep warm and salvaging junk food from vending machines to survive. Never mind that, as the temperature continues to plummet outside, the potential for urban glacierization increases with each passing hour. (The flash-frozen Empire State Building already looks like the world's largest Popsicle.) For Sam, there's only one thing worth worrying about: Will he ever manage to muster enough courage to tell Laura (Emmy Rossum), his pretty classmate, that he kinda-sorta likes her?

The Day After Tomorrow isn't a comedy, strictly speaking. Still, it's difficult to muffle a knowing chuckle each time this guilty-pleasure popcorn flick introduces misplaced priorities amid massive cataclysms. Here and elsewhere, it's crystal-clear that director Roland Emmerich ( Independence Day ) (but, on the other hand, the 1998 Godzilla remake) wants to carry us back to the wacky, wonderful world of disaster movies, that rarefied realm where spectacular calamities occur and faceless multitudes perish only to bring out the best, and the worst, in a cross-section of survivors.

The disaster genre had its fullest flowering during 1970s – not coincidentally, in the aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate, a period when audiences seemed especially eager to distract themselves by vicariously enduring worst-case scenarios – and its conventions were firmly established in such Me Decade masterworks as Earthquake , The Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure . Throughout most of his unabashedly retro Tomorrow , Emmerich plays by the Old School rules in regard to serving just desserts to the worried, the worthy and the worthless. (A few noble souls must perish, alas, for the greater good.) He also reprises a clever twist he employed in his own Independence Day : Rather than use bankable superstars who would never be killed off in a traditional Hollywood blockbuster, he uses second-tier talents -- very good actors, mind you, but not a superstar in the bunch – to portray all of the major characters. As a result, the audience is kept in a mildly pleasurable state of suspense because, gee whiz, anybody on screen could wind up very seriously dead.

Working from a script he co-wrote with Jeffrey Nachmanoff, Emmerich spins a storyline at once epic and intimate. It has something to do with melting ice caps that wreak havoc with ocean currents, and something else to do with humungous storms that cover entire continents with snow and ice. Mostly, though, Tomorrow is all about eye-popping special effects – at one point, those L.A. tornadoes “erase” the Hollywood sign – and the crises, both personal and professional, that beset Jack Hall, a workaholic climatologist earnestly played by Dennis Quaid.

Hall notes a tell-tale warning sign of accelerated global warming when an ice block larger than New Hampshire drops off the Antarctic Shelf. Unfortunately, he's unable to convince the haughty U.S. vice-president (a nicely nasty Dick Cheney caricature by Kenneth Welsh) and other government officials that disastrous climatic shifts are imminent. (Why don't they listen to him? Why do they dismiss his warnings as “sensationalistic claims”? Because they're fools, damn them! Blinkered fools! ) Even more unfortunately, Jack's brainy but shy son -- the aforementioned Sam, of course – is in New York, attending an academic competition, when the weather takes a turn for the absolute worst. But never mind: Jack simply straps on his snowshoes and treks from Philadelphia to New York to be near his boy. If you can believe that, well, you won't have any trouble believing anything else in this blithely fantastical but improbably entertaining movie.

Just remember, dear friends, that it's only a movie. By constructing his fanciful fiction on a shaky framework of disputed facts, Emmerich has generated an impressive amount of publicity for Tomorrow by sparking passionate debates over the real-world potential for global warming. Not surprisingly, people who chronically dismiss or downplay the threat have accused Emmerich of manufacturing some kind of left-leaning, tree-hugging, scientifically-dubious propaganda. Meanwhile, many activists on the other side of the fence have exploited the movie as a tool for fund-raising and consciousness-raising (even while some firebrands fear Emmerich has made global warning appear as probable as, say, a surprise visit by Godzilla). But trust me: It doesn't matter whether Emmerich wants to be a mouthpiece for Greenpeace. Anyone who takes Tomorrow seriously, pro or con, as a cautionary ecological fable might just as well also interpret The Poseidon Adventure as a devastating critique of safety precautions aboard ocean liners.

On the other hand, if you really, really insist on viewing The Day After Tomorrow as a left-wing political statement, consider an equally plausible, alternative interpretation. Sure, the U.S. President (Perry King) is a clueless doofus who always defers to his take-charge, Cheneyesque V.P. And, yes, the movie gets a big laugh by depicting Americans as illegal aliens as they scurry across the border to the warmer climes of Mexico. But take a close look at the U.S. cities that get seriously trashed – New York and Los Angeles, notorious havens for ungodly lefties – and you'll find ample reason to think of the film as arch-conservative fantasy-fulfillment: Armageddon II: Revenge of the Red States or The Re-Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. "