‘My friend Teddy says your life flashes in front of your eyes when you die…’
I love a disaster movie, me. Armageddon, 2012, The Day After Tomorrow, I love all of those movies. Sometimes you want to watch something that is going to move you. Sometimes you want to watch something that will make you question life itself. But sometimes, just sometimes, you want to watch a bunch of shit blow up. Despite my love for the genre, I will admit that times are hard for the noble disaster movie right now. Aside from recent notable examples (Deepwater Horizon, Crawl, The Impossible), the days of major studios spending hundreds of millions of pounds on something that isn’t a franchise movie are pretty much over. And this is a shame, because when done right, there is nothing better than watching the world crumble…
So, what do we have here? Aliens? Climate disaster? Nope. We are back to our old favourite the huge rock from outer space. Also seen in Armageddon, Deep Impact and even The Good Dinosaur, the comet can be a symbol of man’s insignificance in the universe or it can just be an excuse for madness and mayhem. Greenland is kind of both.
When a comet breaks apart over Earth’s atmosphere and starts sending deadly debris over all parts of the planet, the human race looks doomed. In the wake of this unfortunate event, various people considered to be of value to the rebuilding effort are pinged by the government in a bid to assist in the building of the new world. Greenland follows John Garrity (Gerard Butler), a simple home builder, and his family, as they attempt to reach the government compound.
Butler is an old hand in this area having already starred in White House Down and it’s various sequels (alas, I haven’t seen any of those movies), and he anchors Greenland with a gritty and heroic turn as a man who must do what it takes to protect his family. Morena Baccarin has less to do as Garrity’s estranged wife Allison, but she shares a believable chemistry with Butler, and succeeds in adding pathos to the film’s more emotional scenes.
But, what of the explosions? Well, while the effects are tastefully handled here, director Ric Roman Waugh simply doesn’t have the budget to create something on the scale of those previously mentioned disaster classics, but he certainly does the best with what he has, with one scene featuring fireballs raining down from an angry red sky particularly effective.
Greenland isn’t an inventive movie, and it’s not offering anything we haven’t seen before, but we are so rarely treated to this kind of film anymore that for fans of the genre, Greenland is pretty essential. And after sitting through three and a half hours of the admittedly wonderful Seven Samurai, I needed something to take the edge off.