Greenland
STXSurprisingly, the disaster action movie Greenland is not the typically expected Gerard Butler misfire that one has come to expect. It’s actually pretty good. The loss of Chris Evans as star and Neill Blomkamp as director is big, as we shall never get to see what their version would have looked like. However, Butler has stepped in to save the day and keep Greenland alive, whilst also reuniting with Angel Has Fallen director Ric Roman Waugh in the process.
Greenland is very much a generic disaster movie in both form and execution, with nothing new on show here. Yet, Waugh finds within it an opportunity to tell a very touching, familial story. The plot sees Butler’s John Garrity, his wife Allison (Morena Baccarin) and young son Nathan (Roger Dale Floyd) on a desperate journey of survival as a massive comet is expected to extinct our planer within forty eight hours. This central trio is, thankfully, at the core of every plot decision made and what would usually be a boring and unsympathetic archetypal family, is instead a group of people full of character, easy to root for. Greenland has a heart and wears it proudly on its sleeve, which is a really rare occurrence in movies of this genre.
The success of the family element also serves to amplify the action. Once the action starts, it rarely lets up and the greatest tension is extricated through splitting the family up in a tumultuous world and putting them through the ringer, in a way that plays carefully and successfully with sentiment and emotion. The stakes are always supposed to be high in disaster movies, yet Greenland succeeds in making the stakes actually feel high.
Cheesiness is expected, but mostly avoided and because of this, the odd occasion is easily forgivable. Scott Glenn particularly detracts from the frenziness of the whole story in his brief appearance, rather than adding anything of value. Waugh and cinematographer Dana Gonzales are aiming for realism and have worked together to showcase a gritty, yet sleek, version of reality that manages to hold up over the course of two hours. The dimly lit nighttime motorway sequences, of which there are several, scream homage to the noir genre, whilst the shots of chunks of comet streaking across the horizon seem beautifully chaotic, as opposed to CGI laden.
The movie is a tad overlong; in fact, the exclusion of the final scene would have resulted in an infinitely more effective and unique film, tied up neatly with an interestingly poetic ending. However, Waugh isn’t interested in ‘ifs’, he clearly wants to offer up a distinct conclusion to this entertaining story and – after the hell he has put his protagonists through – can anyone blame him?