Review for Doomsday Collection (The Day After Tomorrow / The Day the Earth Stood Still / Independence Day)

Introduction

I only went and did it again! I went and bought a multi-film boxset thinking it would be better value for money than buying the film I wanted by itself. I’d been hovering over the Independence Day Blu-ray for months, waiting for it to shift downwards from around £8, and it refused to do that. Then I happened to notice this Doomsday Collection in a local supermarket, 3 disaster epics on Blu-ray for the simple price of £10, and among them the film I wanted, Independence Day. That’s just £3.33 a film! No wait, one of them is The Day The Earth Stood Still. That’s just £5 a film, better value than £8 for a single disc. But do I really want The Day After Tomorrow? Just like the last time I did this, I’ll do it in ‘Get the dross out of the way first’ order.

Introduction: The Day The Earth Stood Still

The world is thrown into a frenzy when it appears that an object from space is on a collision course with New York, but that frenzy actually intensifies when that collision doesn’t occur. Instead the object slows down and lands in Central Park. Helen Benson is an astrobiologist who is drafted by the US Government alongside other scientists and engineers to ‘deal’ with the problem. But her particular skills prove more essential when the glowing orb disgorges a mysterious gelatinous figure, and when the gung-ho military opens fire, followed by an ominous giant automaton. The gelatinous figure is an incubator from which hatches a human, an otherworldly human by the name of Klaatu. Klaatu’s here to save the world... from humans. The US government reacts predictably, so it falls to Helen Benson to somehow convince Klaatu of humanity’s worth and potential.

Picture: The Day The Earth Stood Still

The Day The Earth Stood Still gets a 2.35:1 widescreen transfer at 1080p resolution. I’d need a microscope to seek out any flaws, and frankly getting that close to the screen would defeat the point. The image is excellent, with bold, consistent colours, stupendous detail, and it brings across the action without issue. There is a filmic look to the movie, and there’s a constant and subtle level of grain throughout. Any criticism you might have would be down to the creative choices, the overabundance of CGI, or the deliberate shifting of the colour palette towards blue and green, with reds practically absent from the screen.

Sound: The Day The Earth Stood Still

Your primary choice will no doubt be the DTS-HD MA 5.1 Surround track, and it’s an excellent, robust surround track, suitably bombastic during the action sequences, but subtle and efficient when it needs to be, making full use of the soundstage to bring across the film’s effects. The dialogue, such as it is, is mostly clear, and for the odd mumbled word you do have subtitles. Other soundtracks on the disc include a DD 5.1 Audio Descriptive English track for the partially sighted, DTS 5.1 French, Italian, Russian, and one Cyrillic titled language I don’t recognise. You get subtitles and signs in these languages, as well as subtitles for the audio commentary, and there are further subtitles in Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish and more.

Extras: The Day The Earth Stood Still

You can bet that I wasn’t all that keen on exploring further into this disc so I’m really only confirming that the following extras exist. I didn’t actually watch them all through.

Insert the disc and before the animated menu, the disc autoplays a trailer for the X-Men Trilogy.

On the disc you get a commentary with screenwriter David Scarpa, and in Klaatu’s Unseen Artifacts: Picture in Picture Track, you get to see some pre-visual and special effects footage in a small box in the corner of the screen while watching the film.

These are accessible using Bonusview during the film, using the coloured buttons on your remote, and not listed in the extras but accessible as well through Bonusview are the film’s storyboards.

Build Your Own Gort is a remote control waste of time that serves no purpose.

There are a series of featurettes about the film, Reimagining the Day (30:06), Unleashing Gort (13:52), Watching the Skies: In Search of Extra-Terrestrial Life (23:08), and The Day The Earth Was Green (14:04). These are all presented in HD resolution. Incidentally, the clips of the original film in HD look gorgeous.

There are Stills Galleries featuring Concept Art, Storyboards, and Production Photos, and finally there is the Theatrical Trailer.

It all looks pretty useful if you enjoy this film.

Conclusion: The Day The Earth Stood Still

This is a disaster movie... No, this movie is a disaster! Of all the pointless remakes in the history of cinema, this might just be the most pointless. The original was a classic in the true sense of the word, a perfectly judged commentary on man’s self-destructive nature and a timely allegory on the cold war paranoia that was sweeping the US at the time. It’s a film that was perfect for its time, yet has stood the test of time since then with remarkable resilience. As the saying goes, ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t try and fix it.’

They tried to fix The Day The Earth Stood Still, to make it relevant for current generations, and by doing so, they broke it utterly. Now the film gets an eco-message to convey, that we humans are a plague on the world, and that we’re screwing it up, not only for ourselves, but for every other living thing as well. The aliens’ solution? Destroy the planet... Not get rid of the humans and leave the rest of the ecosystem intact to recover from our depredations, but grab a couple of specimens for a Noah’s Ark, completely destroy the planet, and then start again from scratch. When that is the depth of thinking that went into the film’s story, it’s impossible to take seriously.


And while the setting has moved on from the Cold War paranoia of the fifties, the mentality of its characters, particularly the US Government and its military hasn’t; people who still shoot first and decontaminate the fallout afterwards. This is the generation that watched ET as kids, and seeing the simplistic characterisations jars with the modern setting of the film. The film is full of plot holes, a story that makes little sense, with lame dialogue, and irritating characters, not only the annoying kid, but Klaatu himself. I doubt I’m the first to say that Keanu Reeves is too wooden here to be a believable alien, and I doubt I’d be the last either.

Then there is the ending, which makes even less sense than the rest of the film. I could waste another paragraph on my peeves about it, but I’d rather not waste the batteries in my keyboard typing it. Hey, I can be green too! Anyway, onwards to the next movie in the collection.

3/10

Introduction: The Day After Tomorrow

No-one ever listens to the earnest scientists, especially the ones that tell you that the world as we know it will come to an end, lest mankind changes its ways. Jack Hall is a paleoclimatologist who has firsthand experience of that, as he’s found evidence of rapid climate shifts in polar ice, a previous ice-age the counterintuitive result of global warming. He notes that human activity adding to the greenhouse effect could result in another ice-age, but when his conservative estimates of such an impact are between 100 and 1000 years, not a lot of politicians are inclined to listen.

He shouldn’t have erred on the side of caution in his results, as suddenly it’s snowing in the summer in India, giant hail is falling in Tokyo, and Los Angeles is almost destroyed by tornadoes. The worst has happened, the climate balance has shifted, and the world is about to enter a new Ice Age, only it won’t be a matter of years, it will be a mere matter of days before the Northern Hemisphere is blanketed in ice. Meanwhile Jack’s son Sam is in New York for an Academic tournament when the rain starts falling, and it just doesn’t stop... until it freezes that is.

Picture: The Day After Tomorrow

The Day After Tomorrow gets a 2.35:1 widescreen transfer at 1080p resolution. It’s your typical Blu-ray gorgeousness, clear and pristine, with amazing colours and excellent detail for the most part. Black detail is good, and so are bright images, but it’s in the twilight that things tend to fade a bit, particularly interiors of the library or Terry Rapson’s dusty research lab in Scotland. Some of the CGI in this film is fantastic; particularly the scenes from the space station, but then again there are those atrocious CGI wolves...

Sound: The Day After Tomorrow

You have the choice between DTS-HD MA 5.1 English, DTS 5.1 Italian and Spanish, and a whole plethora of subtitles for the film and for the extras, mostly in these three languages, and those of the Scandinavian bloc. The dialogue is clear throughout, and the surrounds put up a good fight against the egregious excesses of howling wind and crashing ice. The Day After Tomorrow is also cursed with a music score so portentous that it feels like a cliché in itself.

Extras: The Day After Tomorrow

Incidentally, watch the film first before you bother mucking about with the options or the extras. The pop-up menu pops up just fine, but if you have overscan turned off on your TV, as you should, then it fails to pop-back off properly, leaving a few blue pixels at the top of the screen which will distract you through the film.

Don’t let the screencap on back of the case fool you, there is no top menu for this film. It will play automatically when you put the disc in, and at the end of the film, it will loop back to the beginning again. Also you can’t resume where you left off if you stop the disc. You have to use the pop-up menu to navigate. And once again, I just sampled the extras.

There is a commentary track with Director/Co-Writer Roland Emmerich, and producer Mark Gordon. It’s a pretty normal commentary from what I listened to, a little gappy, a little informative, and way more profane than the film.

There is a Global Warming Trivia Track which pops up little captions of information during the film.

There is a Search Content feature, which acts like an index and lets you jump to a scene that features whatever subject is listed in it. It’s one of the daftest ideas I’ve ever seen for a movie. For an encyclopaedia maybe, but not a movie. There is also a Personal Scene Selection thing that lets you set bookmarks for your favourite bits, pretty useless if the player forgets the disc if you just press stop.

The most interesting thing on this disc is the selection of deleted scenes, particularly one stockbroker subplot which should have stayed in, as it was just the right level of daft comedy to suit this film. There are about 19 minutes of deleted scenes in total.

There is a multiple choice trivia game for you to waste some time on.

Finally there are a couple of trailers for this film, plus a trailer for Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer.

Conclusion: The Day After Tomorrow

They’re the smartest kids in the universe, so smart that they’re in New York for an intercollegiate trivial pursuit competition against the smarmiest schools around, when the next Ice Age hits. They make it to the library where they find shelter, and lots of books to burn so they can keep warm, all the while lamenting the loss of great literature to the flames. Because in this movie, the wooden bookshelves, chairs, and tables are all fire-retardant!

In some films there is one plot point, one moment of stupidity that throws you out of the experience, has the suspenders on your disbelief snap so painfully that your nipples will be sore for a month. The Day After Tomorrow is replete with these moments, but it’s the smart idiots in the library that have me yelling profanities at my screen. Compared to that, the flash frozen helicopter pilots are almost reasonable. Hell, I’d be willing to forgive the plethora of bad science in this film if it just didn’t take itself so seriously. But it’s as earnest and po-faced as its lead character throughout, it proclaims its carbon neutrality in the end-credits, and it even got the Al Gore seal of green approval when it was released to cinemas.


But really it was a climate change sceptic’s wet dream. By taking itself so seriously, it presented its wild fantasies as having the ring of truth, crackpot theories that were easy to poke holes in, and it wound up tarring genuine climate science with the same brush in the eyes of movie-going Joe Public. Worse than that, it really isn’t a good film. It blows its special effects, disaster movie wad in the first 40 minutes or so, and thereafter it’s a tedious trek through a narrative tundra all the way to the end credits.

It could have been a lot better if it just didn’t take itself so seriously, the deleted comedy stockbroker subplot being a good example of the tongue-in-cheek attitude it needed. It also needed to space out its big budget effects sequences a little more so that the last half of the film wasn’t so dull. It needed characters with wit, style and charisma, rather than the earnest seriousness that deadens the screen; it needed Tuck Pendleton, not Jack Hall. I found that I couldn’t care less about any of the characters in this film, not even the poor kid stricken with cancer and stranded in a hospital just to tug at my heartstrings. How cruel are these filmmakers? The further back you go in Roland Emmerich’s filmography, the better the film, and I really shouldn’t be comparing this film unfavourably to Godzilla.

5/10

Introduction: Independence Day

Finally, we get to the whole point of me buying this boxset, one of the biggest blockbuster movies of all time, a film that I first experienced in a London cinema way back in 1996. It’s a film that I have bought at least once in every format since then. Aliens invade the planet Earth, and blow the major cities, and the world’s most cinematic landmarks to kingdom come. All that stands between them and total annihilation of the human race is the President of the United States, an ace fighter pilot / NASA washout, and a cable TV repair guy. It’s War of the Worlds for the pre 9/11 generation, back when you could watch mass destruction and loss of life on screen while happily munching away at your popcorn with a grin on your face, and not the slightest qualms about ‘realism’, and that the GDP of a small nation gets blown on special effects.

Picture: Independence Day

Independence Day gets a 2.35:1 widescreen transfer at 1080p resolution, and to be quite frank, I wasn’t all that impressed by it. Certainly it’s in a wholly different league from the disappointing DVD edition that I still have, which itself wasn’t helped by ‘seamlessly’ branching standards converted extra scenes with native PAL footage for its extended edition. Independence Day’s Blu-ray transfer is strong, clear and sharp throughout, and nice and stable, with a welcome absence of print damage and dirt.


It’s just that I felt that overall the image was softer than I’ve come to expect from Blu-ray, and that it wasn’t making the most of the film source. Also, the print seemed slightly processed, with grain somewhat static and really quite light, and skin tones a little too even, as if a little aggressive DNR has been applied. Of course the original film may have been rendered with this glossy sheen in post-production, and it’s been too long since I saw it in the cinema to compare. It didn’t feel like the reference quality disc a blockbuster of this magnitude deserves, although the extra detail offered by Blu-ray was certainly appreciated.

Sound: Independence Day

No such qualms with the audio, with the sole DTS-HD MA 5.1 Surround English track more than up to the job in conveying the hi-octane action thrills and spills, and with the painful bass during the ominous alien spaceship shots threatening distortion at times. The action gets the full surround treatment, and the various dogfights and mass destruction sequences keep things lively. You’ll notice when a flying fire-engine with its siren wailing goes flying past you. As per blockbuster norms, the dialogue levels suffer in the balance compared to the action and David Arnold’s music score, but at no point is the dialogue inaudible, and just to be kind to my neighbours, I had the volume at half its normal setting. Subtitles are available in English and Scandinavian for the film, the commentaries, and the trivia track.

Extras: Independence Day

There is no extended version on this disc, just the theatrical version, and given how those extra scenes were just a lot of character expanding tedium, poorly edited in, that’s probably for the best. Unfortunately, most of the extra features on that DVD release also fail to make it to this disc, which means yet another Blu-ray purchase for which I still have to keep the DVD.

This disc takes its cue from The Day After Tomorrow in terms of presentation. There is no top menu screen, it just plays the film automatically after insertion, and loops back to the beginning when the film ends. And just like that other disc, it teases you with a screenshot for a main menu on the back of the case. There’s just a pop-up menu from which you can access the disc’s audio and subtitle options, extras and scenes.

The audio commentaries on this disc are taken from that DVD release, with a filmmaker’s commentary from Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin, and a VFX commentary with Volker Engel and Doug Smith.

New to this release is an Alien Scavenger Hunt Game, a slow-arsed Java creation where you navigate a crosshairs around the screen during the film, trying to tick twelve things off a list, so you can unlock a little extra footage. I can tell you for free that I’m not wasting 2 plus hours of my life on that!

You get the Theatrical Trailer and three Teaser Trailers.

The ID4 Datastream Trivia Track, flashes little captions of ‘interesting’ info during the film.

Finally there is the same nonsense from the Day After Tomorrow Disc, Fox on Blu-ray offering a trailer for Fantastic Four, Keyword search delivering a pointless index to the film (it’s not a reference book, guys), and the ability to set your own bookmarks, pointless as my player forgets this disc as soon as I press stop.

Conclusion: Independence Day

Talk about a depressing statistic. Independence Day is 17 years old. People who weren’t born when this film was released will be able to vote next year, and Will Smith looks just as he did when he made this film. Maybe there is something to Scientology after all! But, Independence Day has stood the test of time surprisingly well over the last couple of decades, with its mix of model shots and pyrotechnics and nascent CGI looking just as impressive in HD as would a more recent blockbuster. Of course we’re starting from a low target, as this film was never meant to be anything more than a summer blockbuster, a popcorn movie, an entertaining thrill ride meant to engage the more fundamental cognitive responses rather than the higher thought functions. But it is still just as much fun now as it was back in 1996, and that’s based on something like my tenth viewing of the film.

In many ways this is the film that I’d hoped that The Day After Tomorrow would be. It’s got the same disaster movie ethic, the thin and inconsequential story, and the emphasis on the magnitude of the visuals, but at no point does this film take itself seriously. It knows exactly what it is, disposable fodder, and has no pretensions to anything more, no heartfelt message lurking beneath its pyrotechnics. And what it has that the later film lacked, is character. It has character in bucketloads. These are interesting and engaging roles, played by actors who light up the screen, even with the wafer thin script. They make each moment shine, and they make the film memorable.


Whether it’s the irrepressible drunk Russell Casse picking the wrong day to quit drinking, Steven Hiller anxiously whupping ET’s ass, President Whitmore delivering the most rousing speech any president, living or dead, real or fictional has ever given, David Levinson’s quirky mission to save the world, or his father Julius picking the oddest times to reference John Lennon, this film is replete with moments that stay with you after the end credits have rolled, and despite its overall mediocrity as a film, ensures that I will probably keep on upgrading it as long as there’s a home cinema industry. Independence Day is still the only film I know where I watched it in the cinema, and the whole audience collectively cheered at the “Welcome to Earth” line. That’s a British audience, in a British cinema.

7/10

In Summary

One day I’ll learn that a bargain is really only a bargain if it saves you money, not winds up costing you more. That day isn’t today, as I hold in my hands a boxset that takes up three times the space on the shelf than just the film alone that I wanted would have, and at the time cost me £2 more. In the long history of pointless remakes, there can be few more pointless than The Day The Earth Stood Still, and that’s even with Hollywood’s current love affair with pointlessness. There are moments to appreciate in The Day After Tomorrow, a flash frozen Royal Family can’t be faulted, but as a film it disappears up its own sense of moral superiority long before it offers any semblance of entertainment. That leaves Independence Day, the sole source of fun in this collection, and really the only movie worth watching. It’s just a shame that I have to still hold onto the DVD, given that only a couple of the extras made it onto the Blu-ray.