The critical consensus on The Day After Tomorrow, which opens today, seems to be pretty much what you’d expect: the visual effects are really, really cool; everything else sucks. Variety excerpt:

A loose remake of “Independence Day” with weather as the villain rather than aliens, “The Day After Tomorrow” is a disarmingly pulpy, eye-popping disaster movie during its first half, and an increasingly dull survival melodrama during its second. …

Although Tokyo gets popped by a torrent of giant hailstones, the first city to really take it on the chin is L.A. … as multiple tornadoes convincingly lay waste to such landmarks as the Hollywood sign and the Capitol Records building. …

[The New York] scenes, which begin with a tsunami all but engulfing the Statue of Liberty and then flooding Manhattan, are perhaps the most impressive in the picture. The frequent aerial views of water surging through the streets are eerie and dramatically convincing, and while some of the setups, with people running and cars and busses flipping, are virtually identical to those in “Independence Day,” there’s nothing in that film to match the shot that assumes the [point of view] of a surfer atop a tidal wave as it surges through midtown. …

Portrayal of the U.S. president (Perry King) is amusing; when confronted with the predicament, he immediately turns to the VP and asks, “What do you think we should do?” Better still is a subversive little plot twist that turns the historical immigration tables, with millions of Americans fleeing the unendurable weather by busting through the closed border with Mexico. [Heh. -ed.] And when the U.S. president finally goes on television at the end to report on the state of the nation, he does so on the Weather Channel.

“The Day After Tomorrow” goes beyond the far-fetched into the preposterous, but the first half delivers enough of what people want and expect from disaster pictures, and there are enough money-shot special effects, that audiences probably will be more satisfied than not.

I can’t wait to see it. :)