Greenland (2020)

Greenland review by Mark McPherson - Cinema Paradiso

Greenland is a semi-self-aware disaster movie in that it knows exactly what the audience came for. The premise is the big draw: a giant series of comets is headed for Earth and threatening to wipe out the planet, leading to Americans panicking as they flee for shelters. Everything that you’d want out of a film such as this is here. The desperation that brings out the best and worst of humanity. Tragic events push our heroes further back in the quest for shelter. Giant balls of fire obliterate cities. A gruff dude lead who isn’t afraid to fight for his family’s life. It ticks all the boxes and does so with gusto.

Gerard Butler plays structural engineer John Garrity, recently divorced to his wife Allison and still close to his diabetic son Nathan. While relationships are attempted to be mended by the gruff John, the world watches as a giant comet by the name of Clarke hurtles towards Earth. Not too many people are worried as they are told Clarke is going to break up when it enters the atmosphere and not really hurt anyone. But then John gets an alert on his phone and his phone only to seek a government shelter where he’ll be admitted with his family. He’s not sure why until it’s revealed that bigger fragments are headed to Earth after Florida suffers a massive impact. And the rocks are going to get bigger. Way bigger. Like, extinction-level rocks!

As fireballs continue to reign down around the world, creating blazes of destruction, people start freaking out about finding proper shelter to survive this event. Folks get desperate and make tearful pleas to John to take their children. John makes the tough call to leave them while Nathan grows terrified that he’ll have to say final goodbyes to his friends. People start attacking and threatening the lives of the Garrity family for a chance at survival, leading to massacres, shootouts, fights, and kidnappings. If the comets don’t kill you first, the rioting and chaotic crowds will, as in one intense situation where they storm a military base for aircraft and end up causing planes to explode in their fury.

Greenland finds all the right ways to ramp up the tension. Nathan forgets his insulin and his parents make a desperate errand to acquire some. The family gets separated and the busy service doesn’t allow for their connection messages to go through. The flaming rocks crash down in various sizes, from big ones that generate burning cities to small ones that pummel cars and assassinate civilians. This leads to scurrying through crowds, escaping explosions, and fast-paced car chases through destruction.

The title is a bit of a spoiler in that the one spot available to the family for shelter that will survive the apocalypse is in Greenland. To get there, the family needs to seek a plane out and find a way of their continent. The journey is naturally a rocky one and the family only seems to get into the shelter at the last possible moment so they can brace for impact and stay together in the face of uncertainty.

Greenland is one of the finer disaster films I’ve seen in that it treats its chaos with earnest and less tongue-in-cheek oddness than Roland Emmerich was better known for. The disaster feels big, the stakes feel high, the humanity feels real, and the whole thing just feels exciting the way it should. The film comes about as advertised but makes its strongest attempt to make yet another film where a giant rock hits our planet more emotionally than a showcase of grand special effects.