For fans of post apocalyptic cinema who love their fiction with subtext and undertones of society and class warfare, you’d probably want to look elsewhere for your brain food. Goodness knows I loves my apocalyptic fiction, but “The Day” is purely apocalypse porn with an artsy gloss added to it for good measure. Director Doug Aarniokoski tries to conceal the fact that this movie is basically a clumsy and one-dimensional action film by lensing the entire film through a black and white filter that saps the color, and directing almost every shot with a hand held camera. Someone at Anchor Bay or WWE studios loves John Carpenter’s “Assault on Precinct 13” because 2012’s “The Day” is basically an end of the world version of it.
After a relatively unexplained apocalypse renders the world a wasteland, five very well fed but dirty young adults travail the land looking for shelter, water, and food. When they happen upon a barn, they discover a pantry filled with supplies. Unknowingly, they’ve stepped in to a trap set by another clan of survivors, and those individuals want these foragers for dinner. Now the five discover one of their own is a traitor, and after a pretty pointless interrogation and torture scene, the group decides to stay in the barn and hold their ground or risk becoming a meal. “The Day” could definitely have benefited from twenty more minutes of story. The film itself barely cracks eighty minutes, and what time we spend on the protagonists is time just learning the basic gist of their personalities and nothing more.
There’s no real humanity to these individuals, and the screenwriter tries to invoke our sense of empathy on the dilemma that these people could very well be a meal for a clan of cannibals if they don’t fight for their lives. With twenty extra minutes and some script redos, these characters could have had real dimension and depth. Which feels like a waste considering the cast is pretty good. Shawn Ashmore is capable of turning in strong performances and solid characters with the proper material, and Shannyn Sossamon with all her faults is a very charismatic actress also capable of losing herself in her characters. And with folks like Dominic Monaghan, and Ashley Bell supporting, “The Day” could have been a very excellent apocalyptic epic.
Sadly, it’s just a one note affair, where characters we speed through knowing have to fight other survivors. And are we supposed to find the cannibal clan the enemies? I mean, this clan we meet are hungry and desperate for food, while the other clan are basically hunting humans and eating them. Aren’t they both basically in the same boat? Why exactly should we empathize with one group and not the other? Common sense dictates that cannibalism would be a natural step at the end of the world when the food runs dry. I digress. “The Day” has so much potential to be a marvelous glimpse at post-apocalyptic savagery, but it just cribs from better films and bears so little story.
During one instance of the film, it becomes merely a redundant series of villains running out from the darkness as characters shoot at them and keep them out of the house. Without knowing these characters in this turmoil, the events become very monotonous very quickly. Meanwhile, the final shots completely feel unresolved, while “The Day” becomes the fiftieth thriller to present its own blatant variation of “In the House – In a Heartbeat” from “28 Days Later.” I had such high hopes. A fairly unremarkable apocalypse film, “The Day” has a lot of chances to provide us with complex characters and intense situations, and instead relies on a one note premise and characters we barely know whom the script begs us to feel some sense of empathy and stress for. “The Day” wastes its talented cast and fails to break the mold in a very popular sub-genre.