8 Things That Don't Look Anything Like They Do In Movies

5. Climate Change Is Bad, But It's Not THAT Bad

Like all the best Hollywood blockbusters, The Day After Tomorrow took a little sliver of truth, pumped it full of protein shakes and sent it to the gym. This is probably because something like climate change, whilst still catastrophic for the human race, would probably make pretty dull date-night viewing.

This is probably the same reason that it's failed to ring alarm bells with large swathes of the general population in real life. Frankly, if a tsunami isn't hitting Manhattan, we don't care.

Whilst sudden shifts in the climate are possible and could even have happened recently (as in, in the last 13,000 years kinda recently), it would still be impossible for that level of cataclysm to occur over just a few short days. In reality, it would probably take at least a decade, if it even happened at all as the warming that took place over that decade could well counteract the effects of an ice age anyway.

In the film, the temperature drops unbelievably fast. This is due to the superstorms pulling down supercooled air from the troposphere and freezing everything in seconds. This sounds pretty sciencey, but it's actually kinda gibberish. Even if we suspend our disbelief for a second here, the filmmakers missed a trick with this one. When water freezes, it expands, it's one of the only things that does this. The inclusion of this tidbit of actual science would give the creators the opportunity to crush enormous structures like paper cups and reduce Manhattan to icy dust.