You know what? Greenland isn’t terrible. It’s actually pretty good. Sure every character here fits some sort disaster movie template – the estranged father and husband, the sick kid who needs his medication, the old guy who wants to die in the same place he’s lived his whole life, etc. – but there is a gritty intimacy here that elevates it to more than just a guilty pleasure.
Given the year we’ve had, I’m not sure how many people still want to watch a movie about the end of the world. These things are usually equal parts terrifying and thrilling, but having lived through a minor apocalypse of our own, Greenland‘s eerily grounded take on the matter might hit a little too close to home.
Experts who seriously underestimate the severity of a catastrophe? Check. People raiding supermarket shelves? Check. Empty pharmacies? Check. Humanity reduced to its basest instincts for survival? Check.
That said, this isn’t just mindless disaster porn. There are real characters here. And a few of them are even well thought out.
Gerard Butler teams up once again with his Angel Has Fallen director, Ric Roman Waugh, for another go at a genre he seems to be singlehandedly propping up. In Greenland, he plays John Garrity, a civil engineer who gets selected by the U.S. government for evacuation to underground bunkers in the Geographic North Pole while the rest of the world is decimated by an enormous asteroid called Clarke.
Now, this isn’t a disaster movie à la Dean Devlin or Roland Emmerich. Butler’s John Garrity isn’t the one guy in the world with all the answers. There aren’t any scientists racing against time to save the planet. And the President of the United States isn’t some kind of action hero. Here, the end of the word is a given. There’s no escaping it. The only thing that remains is trying to find a way to survive.
Waugh takes a much more intimate approach to the proceedings, eschewing the usual hyper masculine protagonist for a paunchy everyman who is just trying his best to save his family while atoning for some past sin. He also pulls us away from the impending calamity and focuses instead on the lives of John, his wife Allison (Morena Baccarin), and their diabetic son Nathan (Roger Dale Floyd).
Their journey is difficult, and perilous, and filled with the usual contrivances, but there are just about enough twists to the usual tropes to keep things interesting. In Greenland, the longest set pieces are dedicated to fraught human interactions and not massive explosions. One scene in particular, involving a seemingly well-meaning couple who agree to give Allison and Nathan a ride when they’re separated from John, is so tense and claustrophobic that you forget that you’re watching an end of the world movie.
Which isn’t to say that there isn’t the usual chaos. But even that is dealt out in an even manner. We first experience the destruction the same way the Garritys do: on television and through the news. As the movie progresses, the peril inches closer and closer, escalating in scale, until we finally witness our spectacular end. All of the action is teased out, slowly intensifying in fear and fury, until the very last seconds of the movie.
Gerard Butler and Morena Baccarin have a tense chemistry that speaks to their characters’ backstories. It isn’t that Armageddon has magically solved all of their problems. Throughout the movie, we feel their apprehension towards each another. Her distrust. His guilt. It is a level of insight and intimacy that you don’t usually get from this sort of movie.
Greenland works because it refrains from indulging in the spectacular. The Asteroid is a plot device rather than a character. It is always present, but never usurps the narrative.
And even though the path of this movie is really rather obvious, even thought it hits all the expected narrative makers, director Ric Roman Waugh nevertheless manages to eke out some real moments of emotion and quiet contemplation. So much so that by the time all of this is over, all you’re hoping for is that this one family survives, even if the world does not.
Greenland
119 minutes
Director: Ric Roman Waugh
Writer: Chris Sparling
Cast: Gerard Butler, Morena Baccarin, Roger Dale Floyd, Scott Glenn, David Denman, and Hope Davis
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