Greenland

 

RATING: B-

Disaster films do not exactly have a good rep these days. They started gaining notoriety for being mostly spectacle-filled, effects-heavy pieces with very little substance and often flat out terrible writing. Roland Emmerich didn't do much to help this case between The Day After Tomorrow and 2012, which are kind of poster cases for this issue. In particular since the latter film, the genre's popularity seems to have tanked. Such films can be mildly enjoyable sometimes, but there's almost always nothing to them beyond popcorn entertainment--and it's a grimmer sort. 

Greenland at least takes a different route than most of its peers--it is in fact less about the spectacle and more about the human element. While there are scenes of destruction, they don't take up the majority of the movie and they often happen so fast there's not much time for action. And we generally only see it from the main characters' perspectives--and unlike some of the other movies in this genre, the destruction doesn't follow them wherever they go, so a lot of what we see is limited to news reports. 

Greenland's big disaster event is a comet breaking up into chunks in the atmosphere which then turn into meteors--which cause enough devastation by themselves, but there's one on the way which will cause an extinction level event. Fortunately, the world governments are somewhat prepared (because of course they are)--and as a result, there is still a way out for part of the population. Cue Gerard Butler's character and his family trying to get to safety before civilization as we know it is quite literally wiped out. 

This is a rather grim movie--not just because of the disaster in it, but because it also makes a point of showing how humans would react in such times. In that respect, it actually is fairly realistic; while there are some number of good people doing the best they can, there's also a number of people who will do whatever they can to survive. In that sense, it's comparable to Steven Spielberg's version of War of the Worlds, although it arguably takes things even further. 

Perhaps the biggest problem with this approach of focusing more firmly on the disaster from the perspective of the protagonists is you have to have a good leading cast for that. Tom Cruise and Dakota Fanning were parts of what helped War of the Worlds work in that regard. Gerard Butler, while not a bad actor, isn't able to do the same and carry the movie here. Morena Baccarin fares better as the wife of the main family, but aside from Roy from The Office and Scott Glenn (both in smaller roles, though Glenn fares pretty well), there's no one else you've probably heard of in this movie. And while the characters themselves do grow on you over time, they don't really grab you from the start. (It doesn't help matters that in this case the movie *does* make use of disaster cliches with its main characters--estranged parents, child with a health condition.) The film and its characters get better later, but there is also a bit of time-wasting in the first half involving a quite idiotic kidnapping. 

Besides the 2005 War of the Worlds comparisons, this could also be called a more competent version of 2012--also about an apocalyptic event, but with better writing, more realistic and less over-the-top, and less annoying characters (and less characters in general). Some aspects of this film--such as the occasionally bumpy first half and the abrupt ending--hold it back a little bit, but it's still a step above a lot of the films in this genre from the past two decades. 

Greenland isn't necessarily anything to write home about, but it's better than might be expected because of its showcasing of how humans would react with an incoming extinction level event. To a degree, the movie almost feels like it's more about that than the Garrity family that we spend most of the time with. The uglier side of that human nature seen here and the very nature of the unstoppable apocalyptic event on the way might make this movie rather too bleak and grim for some. But if you've watched some of the bigger disaster releases from recent years and wished they would be better, this one might pleasantly surprise you a little with its more consistently serious take on a movie disaster.