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It was a different world in 1996, when nasty aliens attacked America in Roland Emmerich's science fiction summer blockbuster Independence Day. Back then, it was all about the exciting state-of-the-art special effects, and it didn't really matter that the rest of the film was inane and corny hackwork. In those carefree days before 9/11, audiences could look on the vividly imagined destruction of city after city with wonderment and awe. It was all in the name of barely serviceable entertainment, and we didn't really have to think about the millions of imaginary dead. In 2004, watching downtown skyscrapers collapse in the early scenes of The Day After Tomorrow should cause more queasiness than the filmmakers intend, even if the buildings are located in Los Angeles. Emmerich and co-writer Jeffrey Nachmanoff ludicrously extrapolate their doomsday scenario from the real-world problem of global warming, even including Bush and Cheney stand-ins. It's a feeble effort at topicality, a transparent effort to morally justify their destruction spectacle, but it isn't sincere. And even those who can stomach watching L.A. reduced to rubble, and New York City to a frozen ghost town, are in for heavy slogging once that's over, and a lame trudge through when the snow rescue plot kicks in. Jake Gyllenhaal and Emmy Rossum are an appealing couple, and there's a silly, clumsily foreshadowed, but fairly exciting action sequence late in the film involving an abandoned Russian ship and a pack of timber wolves escaped from the zoo. The filmmakers are perhaps contractually obligated to end the movie on a note of false uplift, so the film ends up espousing the same principles as the predatory politicians it means to pillory. It doesn't matter how much is lost, or by how many, as long as you and your friends come out on top.