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  Directed by
  Starring
  Specs
  • Widescreen 2.35:1
  • 16:9 Enhanced
  • Dual Layer (RSDL )
  Languages
  • English: Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround
  • English: DTS 5.1 Surround
  Subtitles
    English - Hearing Impaired
  Extras
  • Additional footage
  • Deleted scenes - x10
  • Audio commentary - x2
  • Featurette
  • Isolated music score - Interactive Demo
  • Animated menus
  • Behind the scenes footage
  • Storyboards
  • Documentaries - THE SCIENCE OF TOMORROW, CITY FREEZE
  • Interactive game - DAT- GLOBAL WATCH
  • Animatic

The Day After Tomorrow: Special Edition

20th Century Fox/20th Century Fox Home Entertainment . R4 . COLOR . 118 mins . M15+ . PAL

  Feature
Contract

What do you do when the very planet you live on turns against you? There’s no planet-killer asteroid to blow up, no alien spaceship to inject with a computer virus, no molten core to restart, just Mother Nature taking revenge for centuries of abuse. There’s nowhere to hide, nowhere to run, unless you’re the British Royal Family, oh wait a minute, not even the Queen is safe?!

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3 Reasons to dust more often...

Mother Nature is a vengeful enemy, if you violate her kingdom she will fight back with extreme prejudice, or so The Day After Tomorrow would have us believe.

At its core (no pun intended, really) The Day After Tomorrow is a disaster flick. We begin with the dedicated scientist, Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid) and his small team of climatologists warning the government about an impending and drastic global climate change but his words are ignored by the politicians who have to balance environmental and economic concerns. Jack predicts the climate change will be slow but significant and probably won't happen for another 10 or even 100 years. Imagine his surprise when it begins happening almost immediately.

Floods, hail, tornadoes and violent storms wrack the Earth’s northern hemisphere. With the assistance of another climatologist, Terry Rapson (Ian Holm), Jack and his team calculate that the storm will envelop the entire northern hemisphere within 48 hours, anyone caught outside will be a human popsicle when the ‘superfreeze’ hits.

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Some people don't adhere to water restrictions.

At this point, The Day After Tomorrow changes from a global catastrophe movie into a tale of a father's determination to save his son as Jack realises that Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal) is stranded in the New York Public Library.

Roland Emmerich has directed some huge budget movies, Independence Day, The Patriot, Stargate and Godzilla being the most well known. None of these movies are known for their scientific or historic credibility but they all have one thing in common, they are 'big'. The Day After Tomorrow shows us that Emmerich still knows how to do ‘big’ and do it well (whether ‘big’ and ‘good’ go hand in hand is left up to the viewer).

  Video
Contract

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The Liberty douche.
Presented in the original theatrical aspect ratio of 2.35:1 and 16:9 enhanced the film transfer for The Day After Tomorrow is nothing short of spotless, truly reference material. The menu system on both discs is also 16:9 enhanced, animated with music and easy to navigate, there are also several animated special features discussed below.

A lot of the film is spent in dark or very deep, blue scenes but detail is never lost. Daylight scenes are equally clean and clear. Overall the picture is very sharp and detailed. The only slight blight on an otherwise perfect transfer was a single, minor case of mpeg compression on an actor's face during fast moving shot, a little distracting but nothing serious.

  Audio
Contract

A DTS soundtrack is a must for this type of movie and it was good to see it included as an option together with Dolby Digital 5.1.

As is usually the case the DTS track has the upper hand in all areas, the overall sound is more crisp and clear, the bass channel is stronger, dialog is more distinct and the surround channels are easily distinguishable from the others.

The brilliant score by Harald Kloser and Thomas Wanker really shines in the DTS format. I'm sure there's a joke in there in regards to Thomas Wanker, but a guy with a surname of Hore probably shouldn't be looking for it.

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Someone hail a cab?

The 5.1 soundtrack is also excellent but a little more subdued, the only complaint with the 5.1 soundtrack was that dialog was occasionally overpowered by effects and music but this didn’t happen more than once or twice.

The DTS and Dolby Digital tracks are both available in English only. It goes without saying that if your equipment can handle DTS then it is definitely the way to go (then why did I just say it?).

  Extras
Contract

There are two versions of The Day After Tomorrow available in Region 4, there is a single disc and a Special Edition version available, we were provided with the two disc Special Edition version for review.

Let me begin by saying that I know that downloading movies is illegal, everybody knows that downloading movies is illegal, everybody who downloads movies knows it is illegal and the guys who run gigantic DVD piracy operations surely know it’s illegal. Why oh why do some distributors continue to enforce the Copyright and Anti-Piracy messages upon us via un-skippable screens at the begining of DVDs, that last over a minute in multiple languages that we can't read anyway? Some special features need to be addressed.

The Special Edition consists of two DVD’s, the first contains the movie and 2 commentary tracks.

The first commentary features Director Roland Emmerich and Producer Mark Gordon. They discuss visual effects, production concerns and give mostly complimentary assessments of the actors. While Emmerich puts on his best Arnie impersonation Gordon attempts and succeeds in ruining the PG13 rating of the movie with his commentary. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, in fact, Gordon clearly has a sense of humour where Emmerich is a little too serious. With 461 separate special effects it’s sometimes difficult to tell what is real and what isn’t but this commentary helps a lot in that regard. Gordon and Emmerich give us the lowdown on each scene, what’s real and what’s not, in fact, not a lot is actually real, this movie is almost entirely special effects. This commentary is well worth a listen.

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I tried to land but it's snow good.

The second commentary features cinematographer Ueli Steiger, editor David Brenner, production designer Barry Chusid and co-screenwriter Jeffrey Nachmanoff. This commentary is very boring and dry, interesting to the point of revealing a lot of technical aspects about the filming and production of the movie but hardly an entertaining 2 hours.

The second disc contains well over 4 hours of “Special Edition” deserving extra features, there are a lot of features here so I’ll try to be brief:

Next up are 10 Deleted scenes with optional commentary by Roland Emmerich and Mark Gordon. Emmerich and Gordon discuss why certain scenes were cut or changed, mostly for ratings or timing reasons. This is a good selection of deleted scenes, totalling about 16 minutes of footage.

The science of The Day After Tomorrow takes a look at the Science and Politics of climate Change – a global super storms featurette with scientists around the world. Running at just over an hour and presented in full frame, this featurette is a little dry and boring, I probably should have watched it before the movie rather than after.

Global Watch is an interactive presentation that lets you browse through a record of recent climate catastrophes including floods, hail, storms, tornadoes and anomalies (like fish falling from the sky).

Choose from eight major cities around the world and see a simulation of how each would look after the superfreeze hits in the City Freeze featurette. Interesting if utterly useless and a little cheap looking.

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A deleted scene - The search for the plug hole.

The Pre-Production is comprised of multiple subsections dealing with the steps involved in the pre-production phase of the movie making process. Members of the crew, including Visual Effects Supervisor Karen Goulekas present a six minute segment on pre-visualisations (low res animatics) showing us the process used to frame shots and get special effects planned out in the early stages.

Also in this section is a handi-cam filming of an early pre-production meeting with abysmal sound and video quality, it's not your standard behind the scenes stock though.

Static storyboard and concept art galleries in this section are also worth a look.

Production contains just one segment, Eye of the Storm: Filming “The Day After Tomorrow running at just over an hour. This featurette contains the usual cast and crew interviews, some trivia and a unique two or three image split screen method showing pre-production or special effects shots with actual footage, this technique is also used in some of the other extra features.

Approximately an hour of Post-Production content broken up into several sections. Pushing the envelope is primarily a presentation on the special effects used in the movie. Scoring is not a featurette on how casting was managed but a short item on how the musical score was produced. Audio Anatomy is an interesting behind the scenes special on the sound mixing process for the RAF helicopter crash scene. Finally, there is an interactive demo of the RAF crash scene which allows you to isolate each part of the soundtrack while the scene is playing out in its final form.

Conspicuous in its absence is a Theatrical Trailer unless it's well hidden.

  Overall  
Contract

This 2 disc set is really what a Special Edition should be, pristine video and audio presentation combined with enough special features to keep even the most jaded DVD collector happy for at least a few hours.

While the story and special effects overload in The Day After Tomorrow may not be everybody’s cup of tea this set is an excellent example of what DVD is all about.


  • LINK: http://www.dvd.net.au/review.cgi?review_id=4583
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      And I quote...
    "This Special Edition is an excellent example of what the DVD format is all about. "
    - Chris Hore
      Review Equipment
    • DVD Player:
          Pioneer DV-676A
    • Projector:
          BenQ PB6100
    • Receiver:
          Yamaha RX-V995
    • Speakers:
          Wharfedale Diamond
    • Centre Speaker:
          Wharfedale Modus
    • Surrounds:
          Wharfedale Diamond
    • Audio Cables:
          Standard Optical
    • Video Cables:
          Standard Component RCA
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