Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Ric Roman Waugh
Starring: Gerard Butler, Morena Baccarin, Roger Dale Floyd, Scott Glenn, David Denman, Hope
Davis
What I've missed most about not being able to visit cinemas for most of the
past year isn't the thrill of watching a great movie on the big screen,
because a great movie will work no matter where you watch it. No, what I've
missed most is the experience of watching mediocre garbage in the cinema.
You know what I mean. The sort of movies you know are going to be bad going
in, but you don't care because you just want to detach your brain for a
couple of hours and chew on rubbery popcorn and guzzle soda while you watch
Gerry Butler punch a comet, and you want to share in the joy of a collective
groan cascading through the rows of seats as some awful line of dialogue is
delivered.
With such modest ambitions in mind, when cinemas briefly reopened with
restricted capacity last summer, one of the movies I was most excited to see
was Greenland - if ever Gerry Butler was going to punch a
comet it's in this one! Alas, it wasn't to be, and director
Ric Roman Waugh's disaster movie has quietly crash landed on Amazon,
denied the shock-waves its impact might have created had it been given a
theatrical release under normal circumstances.
The setup for a Roland Emmerich-esque blockbuster is in place here, as a
comet is set to pass closer to our planet than any celestial body ever has
since the rock that wiped out Barney and friends. It should be a harmless
event, and quite the spectacle, but while shopping for hot dogs for a
barbecue at the home of his estranged wife Allison (Morena Baccarin)
and young son Nathan (Roger Dale Floyd), structural engineer John
Garrity (Gerard Butler) receives a recorded message from the
Department of Homeland Security telling him he needs to pack his bags and
bring his wife and son to a nearby airport. Turns out the government has been keeping quiet about just how close the
comet is brushing against our pale blue dot, with fragments beginning to
break away, causing devastation wherever they land.
With a particularly large chunk set to land in Western Europe and destroy
most life on our planet, a select few have been chosen to rebuild the world,
and are being scuttled off to secret shelters in Greenland. When Nathan is
denied entry to the plane due to his diabetes (it's survival of the
fittest), the family find themselves separated and set about reuniting at
the home of Allison's father (Scott Glenn) before making a break for
Canada, where planes are set to embark for Greenland.
Despite its apocalyptic premise, Greenland has little in
common with the likes of Armageddon, 2012 or the previous Gerry Butler vs nature romp
Geostorm. It's a relatively intimate survival thriller, which save for a silly
sequence in which Butler drives through a meteor storm, plays its drama with
a straight face. Essentially it's
Miracle Mile, but rather than having to race across a city to board a flight to safety,
John and co. are rushing across a continent.
As is often the case with movies about impending catastrophes, the impending is more intriguing than the catastrophe. The
buildup is quite effective, mining increasing tension from the scenario, and
when the family is separated we've developed enough empathy to root for
their reunion as they navigate various human horrors. It's when they're
forced to contend with the heavenly threat in the second half that
Greenland crumbles like a comet entering an unfriendly
atmosphere. The movie has done such an effective job of remaining grounded
prior to that point that the sight of John dodging falling chunks while
various faceless redshirts are flattened by falling debris feels like it
belongs in another movie.
Greenland gives us the classic trope of the estranged couple
forced to work together to contend with something greater than themselves.
Of course, we know John and Allison are going to put their differences aside
and reunite by the climax, because this a Hollywood movie and despite its
liberal pretence, Hollywood ultimately wants to win the dollars of
conservative America, where divorce is a dirty word. Oddly enough, John and
Allison don't seem all that estranged, so there's a curious lack of conflict
between them. Rather than bickering over the best way to survive, they
simply agree with every proposal offered. On one hand it's refreshing to see
a separated couple portrayed as two people who can maintain cordial
relations, but on the other, it just doesn't make for compelling
drama.
A similar misstep is the casting of Butler. The character of John is very
much an out of his depth everyman, so it's odd to see him played by someone
we associate with saving the world (or at least the President). This saps
the tension out of some scenes, as we expect Butler to be able to handle
himself. While he does his best, Butler doesn't have the ability of Tom
Cruise to make us forget about his prior roles when he takes on a Joe Soap
role ala Spielberg's War of the Worlds, a movie Greenland often feels like a poor cousin to.
