History Film / TheDayAfterTomorrow

** Paper is hard to burn without an accelerant. Wooden furniture and doors - of which there is a plentiful supply - would make better fuel.

* EverythingTryingToKillYou: '''BIG''' hail. Tornadoes '''''that join together into supertornadoes'''''. Tsunami. [[spoiler: Wolves]]. Frigid cold -- [[IncrediblyLamePun Have An Ice Death]]!

*** Possibly justified in the case of the Library, As the speed of the water seemed to be significantly reduced by having to flow around the many buildings, perhaps the outer regions of manhattan were flattened (hence why we didn't see them in the movie), but by the time it reached the Library it had lost most of its momentum.

** The IntimateHealing scene could be quite a bit more intimate/awkward. Sam should lose ''all'' of his clothes (keeping wet underwear on is a poor idea) and Laura, whose clothes are also soaked from the rainstorm and splashing around, should be mostly skin-to-skin. As depicted, this wastes a lot of body heat. But this is enforced partially by the fact that Creator/EmmyRossum (Laura) was 16 when filming, so her being stripped down was off the table.[[note]]Contrast the US version of ''[[Series/ShamelessUS Shameless]]'', which started airing a few years later, in which she became the resident MsFanservice.[[/note]]

* ScriptWank: In the finale, the Vice President announces publicly how wrong humanity was to abuse petroleum.

* WokenUpAtAnUngodlyHour: A serious case. Terry Rapson calls Jack Hall while he's fast asleep, but it's not night for him because of time zone differences, and Terry apologizes for the inconvenient timing. The scene loses any humor because the call is about the shift in temperature in the North Atlantic meaning the North Atlantic Current has stalled, meaning disaster is on the way.

** The IntimateHealing scene could be quite a bit more intimate/awkward. Sam should lose ''all'' of his clothes (keeping wet underwear on is a poor idea) and Laura, whose clothes are also soaked from the rainstorm and splashing around, should be mostly skin-to-skin. As depicted, this wastes a lot of body heat. But this is enforced partially by the fact that Emmy Rossum (Laura) was 16 when filming, so her being stripped down was off the table.

* CoolClearWater: After New York gets flooded, the water is surprisingly devoid of all the assorted junk and grime you'd expect to be floating around in flooded streets, and looks remarkably clean and clear, likely due to the limitations of CGI technology at the time the movie was made. In a later underwater scene, debris is clearly visible, with crumbled masonry and pieces of twisted steel scattered among the sunken taxis and the wreck of a city bus.

* CoolClearWater: After New York gets flooded, the water is surprisingly devoid of all the assorted junk and grime you'd expect to be floating around in flooded streets, and looks remarkably clean and clear, likely due to the limitations of CGI technology of the time. In a later underwater scene, debris is clearly visible, with crumbled masonry and pieces of twisted steel scattered among the sunken taxis and the wreck of a city bus.

** The notorious “super-freeze” scene, where New York City is caught in the eye of the storm and frozen solid, is [[HollywoodScience impossible for a number of reasons]]. The eye of a hurricane is where the storm’s low pressure center is found, and so the air there should actually be ''rising'' and not falling. Also, the average temperature in the upper reaches of the troposphere is only about -60°F (-51°C), far greater than the -150°F (-101°C) given in the movie. The temperature at which the flash-freezing effect occurs in the film is lower than anything ever recorded on Earth.

* CoolCleanWater: After New York gets flooded, the water is surprisingly devoid of all the assorted junk and grime you'd expect to be floating around in flooded streets, and looks remarkably clean and clear.

* IdiotBall: Laura demonstrates after Sam almost drowns in freezing waters that she's smart enough to know how to stop Sam from suffering heart failure ([[WorstAid excusing any artistic license, it does seem to work in the movie's setting]]). Which makes it all the more curious; ''what the hell'' was Laura thinking when she decided to treat a massive gash on her leg that got opened in filth-ridden brown floodwaters like it was nothing more than an arm bruise, even as it should have become increasingly obvious to her that the wound had turned septic?

** The people in the library ignoring the dozens and dozens of ''wooden tables'', shelves, and doors they could burn instead of the books. Yes, some they would have to avoid in case the treated wood produced harmful vapor, but in general, they could have busted the wood furniture up and burned them to keep warm. It would last far longer than the paper burning.

* IncurableCoughOfDeath: Blood poisoning somehow gives Laura one of these. It's how Sam figures out she's sick.

* RuleOfDrama: Laura succumbs to blood poisoning just before the lethal eye of the storm is about to strike New York, and just as the eye reaches their location, Sam and the others are attacked out in the open as they're retrieving medicine and food by a pack of hungry wolves, forcing them to make a mad dash back to the safety of the library just as the temperature is dropping.

* SecretStabWound: To add drama, Laura keeps quiet about her cut wound so [[SecretlyDying nobody knew she was actually suffering from blood poisoning]].