Iafter a year where many of us have been obsessed with anti-escapist films about disasters engulfing the world, while also getting to see a junkier than usual line-up of wannabe blockbusters (both the obvious result of the dreaded C word), is there something fitting in closing the year out with Greenland, a chaotic comet thriller that presents the apocalypse on a chipped board, the bargain combo 2020 deserves.
Originally set to play Chris Evans with District 9’s Neill Blomkamp at the helm, we have instead reunited Ric Roman Waugh with his Angel Has Fallen star Gerard Butler, a lower wattage prospect exacerbated by the film’s main theatrical release. in June who swapped for an on-demand launch for Christmas. Butler, who last faced natural disasters in 2017’s horrific Geostorm, plays John, a structural engineer who tries to fix things with his estranged wife Allison (Morena Baccarin) and son Nathan. But in a pleasantly fast and frantic fashion, their lives are turned around by an incoming comet, a comet originally predicted to pass Earth but now causing mass destruction. John gets a call to tell him that he and his family have been pre-selected for shelter, putting them on their way to safety, although it is far from smooth …
Operating on a much lower budget than that for a movie of its kind (only $ 35 million compared to Geostorm’s $ 120 million or even the much less action-oriented Contagion’s $ 60 million), Greenland is being sold for grand spectacle, but doesn’t contain that much of it . I’d say it’s just enough for viewers not to feel short (it’s not a Reign of Fire in that regard), but it’s a movie that tells the greatest moments in fleeting montage, something that works both for and against . The tight focus on a family’s struggle to stay alive rather than having the experts figuring out what to do behind the scenes is refreshing (Butler’s everything can only do so much to help) and there’s a terribly well-orchestrated fear for some of the earlier, surprisingly credible scenes. The specifics of selection and how this process would then work during a disaster (starting with the newly adopted presidential warning leading to a QR code) feels almost compelling enough and it’s clammy to see the characters desperately trying everything to find out. The script, from Buried writer Chris Sparling, is also imbued with a rather pessimistic view of humanity, characters displaying horrible behaviors that are easily recognizable after the year we’ve all had.
But the lack of identifiable characteristics of the family (father = husband, mother = wife, son = diabetic) means we get tired of them all too quickly. The indulgent two-hour running time also means their journey starts to slog, losing even the slightest degree of credibility by the time we reach the movie’s absurd finale. The clue to where it’s all going is in the title, and despite the movie’s enjoyable extreme rise of global chaos, they’re all crescendos in a classic “eat your pie and eat it” disaster movie that ends.
It’s an adequate, adequate midday watch (vague praise: better than Geostorm) and for those with a certain destructive itch that has yet to be scratched, this should do the job.