Roland Emmerich’s mainstream career may be in danger of falling off a critical and commercial cliff in the wake of Moonfall, but the filmmaker will always have the glory days of Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, and 2012 to look back on, when he fully earned the title of cinema’s Master of Disaster.
Taking big budget and high concepts to the extreme, Emmerich shot to fame for ladling stupid dialogue and nonsensical plotting on top of delicious eye candy that almost always ended with at least a handful of recognizable landmarks being reduced to nothing but a pile of smoldering rubble. Or in the case of The Day After Tomorrow, frozen solid rubble.
The 2004 spectacular netted an impressive $552 million at the box office in the face of reviews from both critics and audiences that could very generously be surmised as underwhelming, but nobody pays for a ticket to go and see the latest Emmerich film for well-rounded characters and a satisfying narrative resolution, and anyone who does is only going to be left bitterly disappointed.
To that end, The Day After Tomorrow has been bracing for the second ice age on streaming this week, with FlixPatrol labeling the $125 million exercise in extravagance as one of the most-watched features on Rakuten’s global charts. We’d love to see Emmerich recapture his mojo and deliver something similar again, but the prognosis is looking bleak after Moonfall ironically cratered on all fronts last year to go down as his biggest bomb yet.