If one wants to believe the genre of disaster, global cataclysms are nothing less than free couple therapy and family counseling. Why spend all that time trying to repair your marriage or become a better father than you? children when a couple of days in the face of some annihilation of alien invaders, asteroids or extreme weather will do the trick? Greenland it is no different in this respect. Despite the pandemic, our annual Gerard Butler film, painted in numbers, is here, and if Paisley’s favorite son won’t save the president or the planet, at least he will save his family.
To be fair, Butler’s character, John Garrity, is less of a monomaniacal man than the star’s usual saviors, who work federally. He is a structural engineer whose marriage is already on the rocks, well, the real rocks are starting to fall from the sky: interstellar remains of a passing comet. The first eliminates Tampa, with many more to come, including a “planet killer” the size of an extinction event. Not knowing this would happen seems like serious negligence on the part of the scientific community. But who has time to blame anyone when everyone runs in search?
Greenlandscript it actually adds an intriguing wrinkle to the pre-apocalyptic fight for safety. The Garritys: John, his wife Allison (Morena Baccarin), and his 7–The two-year-old son Nathan (Roger Dale Floyd) – meets in the living room with his neighbors watching the first piece of comet remains enter the television. Something has gone terribly wrong. The fireball in question did not explode in a light show over the Atlantic Ocean as promised. As reports of destruction begin to arrive, an emergency alert sounds on John’s phone — and no one else’s — followed by an automatic call with instructions to pack a bag and report to a police station. Near Air Force to evacuate to unknown parts.
It is clear what is happening. The days are numbered and soon CNN will air that 40-year-old tape of the military band playing “Nearer, My God, To Thee.” Some final trial backup plan has just been activated, and John and his family are part of it, while his friends and relationships are not. Except, as the Garrities learn with difficulty, their evacuation order was a mistake; they were supposed to have been removed from the list due to Nathan’s diabetes. As for where apocalypse-proof bunkers could be found, this is a government secret. (It’s Greenland.)
It’s easy to imagine how a better film could chase this cruel psychological experiment to the end, perhaps even come to an ironic conclusion in which the big planned event never happens. But this is a Gerard Butler movie. It responds to its harsh appeal and the least common denominators of a boiler formula: reunite the family, avoid unknown villains, save yourself. At some point, one begins to wish Butler was playing one of his hard sadists, rather than an approach of a repentant man. We are destined to feel violence here, but director Ric Roman Waugh (from last year’s Gerard Butler film, Angel has fallen), doesn’t seem to have the ribs to maintain a sense of tension beyond the nightmare scenarios of the first act.
Instead, we endure what appears to be the enlarged cut of one of the six simultaneous plots of a Roland Emmerich film, only to be treated to the grand finale of the burning drops of digital rubber and effects. cheap and cheesy. If a film is to kill most species on behalf of the nuclear family, it should at least do so with some staging and style.