Movie Review: ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ is still chilling, literally

Winter won’t be back for a while, but as movies go, “The Day After Tomorrow” is a good way to prepare for it early.

Currently streaming on Hulu for a 20th-anniversary engagement, director and co-writer Roland Emmerich’s (“Independence Day”) disaster saga has been a cable-network staple since soon after its 2004 theatrical release, and it’s easy to see why. It’s a high-concept picture that poses a universal dilemma: What if mankind experienced a global freeze-over? Though the cold-weather season will remain at bay for a while, with many people more likely to stay inside, the film will be particularly relevant then.

It’s part of the basic disaster-movie formula that such a project sets several personal stories against the larger backdrop of the crisis at hand. Here, those characters primarily are a climate expert and his son, played by Dennis Quaid and Jake Gyllenhaal. Dad eventually gets to say, or at least think, “I told you so” after trying to warn dismissive authorities of the approaching problem — and he eventually sets out to retrieve his offspring, who’s stranded in a suddenly glacial New York with fellow students (including the one he has a mad crush on, portrayed by Emmy Rossum) during a school trip.

Of course, such a mission won’t be without its hiccups, and Emmerich and his team effectively use their special-effects know-how to depict a world turned to ice with stunning visuals. Some are seen as long shots, with a frozen cloak of atmosphere moving across locales such as midtown Manhattan; others supply close-up flashes of horror, as when a crew member of a crashed helicopter opens the door of the vehicle and promptly gets a much colder complexion than he had mere seconds earlier.