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The Day After Tomorrow was rightly panned by critics. The science is ridiculous and misleading to a point of almost criminality. Some of the sequences are wooden and repetitive, like the interactions between Gyllenhaal’s character, his love interest, and her own crush. But, forgive me, no one does end of the world disaster silliness better than Emmerich and this movie delivers the clichés and contrivances in unapologetic droves.

Few movies make me laugh more than the Day After Tomorrow, which makes it second on my list.

1. Deep Impact

But the disaster movie that I can watch, and have watched, several dozen times, is the Tea Leoni, Robert Duvall, Morgan Freeman, Maximilian Schnell, Vanessa Redgrave and, let’s not forget, Elijah Wood disaster movie par excellence. The movie has it all and more - presidential politics and intrigue, again familial reconciliations and noble sacrifices, moments when all hope is lost, animals fleeing from danger, and humans making the wrong move that results in their demise.

Not only that, but it has an entire outer space rescue mission sequence, which copycat Armageddon could only helplessly emulate. I also enjoyed the destruction scenes (Manhattan, of course, bites it), as they were simple in the humans-running-plus-things-falling kind of way, while imaginative in the tsunami and meteor shower variety.

And I can watch Deep Impact because it does not try too hard but it delivers just enough combination of entertainment with seriousness to be watchable both as a completely trite disaster cliché that lives within the annals I have explored here, and also as a marginally more serious human drama about the choices that one would make if we knew the world were about to end.

This is probably makes me like this movie above all others. The entire sequence regarding the lottery to save certain Americans, and the difficult decisions and choices that this mechanism spawns make the movie unique and interesting from a psychological perspective. 2012 attempts crudely to emulate this exploration of how individuals would deal with the impending end, but it doesn’t work for many reasons, none the least of which is that the quickness with which the world crumbles apart makes it impossible for the filmmaker in that movie to really set up the narrative of what the “arc” system means. In Deep Impact, by contrast, because the disaster is several months in the making, both humanity and the viewer have a chance to ponder their fates. So, believe it or not, I’m calling this an actually thoughtful disaster movie, on top of clichéd and absurdly fun.

So, have at it - what are your favorite disaster flicks?

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