When digiwolves attack

I have been meaning to share with the tiny dog audience the glorious idiocy that is The Day After Tomorrow, a deeply ridiculous film about improbably lethal weather incidents and their strangely unmoving consequences, but I realized after several attempts at writing a review that the film is so vacuous that there is only one thing to mention about it, and that is, the subject of the digi-wolves.

As if it isn't enough to fell every human north of the Mexican border with ice that actually can chase you down the hall, the script writing team that brought us this fine piece of summer entertainment thought it not too much to throw in a pack of marauding, bloodthirsty digital wolves who escaped from the zoo with the sole ambition of boarding a Russian freighter to eat the heroic teens who were onboard in search of penicillin to cure a girl of blood poisoning. If only the soaps had this kind of budget! (I feel it may be too much detail to mention that this freighter was stranded in the middle of Manhattan, and landlocked by ice from a sudden global disaster brought on by the disdainful neglect of an environmentally illiterate Cheneylike vice president, and yet, this too was all there in the script).

Now you may be asking, what do I mean by digital wolves. I searched in vain for a picture of the utterly unconvincing holographic critters, and came up empty handed. Essentially, here is how these herky, laughable, stiff-jointed digi-beasts came to be: in a movie with a budget of a google squillion dollars, they thought it best to tape rabbit hair on some sort of dog shaped prosthetic chunks of foam rubber, and turn a pack of semiskilled computer animators loose on the case. The result? Strangely underlit, slavering, robotic simu-wolves, looking like a cross between Chucky and roadkill, with glowing red-hots for eyes and counterproductive hunting strategies such as hurling themselves bodily against closed steel airlocks.

Would it have been such an imposition to hire a couple of dog trainers, spray paint a little frost on some huskies, and reshoot the scene for the sake of verisimilitude?

Apparently, yes.

Once I saw the digiwolves, I was done, although the movie went on for at least another hour. Maybe, just maybe, if the DVD features a bonus such as the digiwolf animation team narrating over the Russian freighter scene, I may be reunited with the digiwolves again, but otherwise, let the subject be closed.

No stars.

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