On a molecular level, Ric Roman Waugh’s “Greenland” is a global disaster picture like any other disaster picture: there is a disaster (natch) that strikes across the world (of course) and the picture’s focus lands on the shoulders of one ordinary guy with family problems who hauls maximum ass to not only rescue his family from said disaster but also reconcile said problems. However, the sameness that relates “Greenland” to films of similar ilk is a matter of nature, and its surprising goodness is a clear matter of nurture. Waugh gives a damn about his material, procured by screenwriter Chris Sparling, and his cast, and in retrospect perhaps he cares about context, too.
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Movies like “Greenland” don’t get to choose their moments, but they do get to choose their response to their moments. STX didn’t choose to release a Gerard Butler vehicle during a pandemic. Instead, the studio did choose, correctly and admirably, to push back its release to December and forego the multiplex for VOD, where can sit in the comfort of their homes and watch Waugh’s catastrophe tale unfold as their kids slumber in their beds. Fair warning, parents — you’ll want to hug your children once the “Greenland” credits roll. Waugh’s interest isn’t in the disaster at all, really, but in the way people react to the disaster’s imminent impact, which sounds cliche until the viewer stops to consider the diverse reactions Americans have displayed to that previously mentioned pandemic. A larger chunk of folks has reacted with compassion and care. A smaller but not-insignificant chunk has reacted with selfishness at best and batshit conspiracy.
In “Greenland,” the former takes precedence. John Garrity (Butler, staying Scottish), a structural engineer living and working in Atlanta, gets a push notification on his phone as a colossal interstellar comet amusingly named Clarke careens toward Earth’s orbit: The text informs him he and his estranged wife, Allison (Morena Baccarin) and their diabetic boy, Nathan (Roger Dale Floyd), have been selected by the government for post-apocalypse recovery, and must report to Robins Air Force Base for extraction on the double-quick. For John, the order is awkward; he’s at his house with Allison, Nathan, and their neighbors for a comet watch party, and nobody else gets the same text. When Clarke makes landfall far, far away from its expected harmless target (the ocean) and instead annihilates Tampa, John hustles Allison and Nathan into the car and on the road for adventure, but not before making harsh choices.
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Everyone wants to be saved. We all, for example, want a vaccine, whether we’re socially distancing or whether we’re throwing house parties with our asshole friends and asshole families. John’s neighbors want to be saved, too, including one woman who tries to hand off her young daughter to the Garrity Family only to be refused. Waugh lingers as they drive off, mother, father, and child crying in each other’s arms, knowing full well that they’re on borrowed time before they’re reduced to ash. It’s an awful moment, one among many as “Greenland” takes its leads across Georgia and through dangers both celestial and human. Frankly, the film works mostly as a screed about how awful we are to each other when our own survival is on the line; comet shards bombarding the surface are almost window dressing instead of the primary obstacle. Compared to nationalism and plain old avarice, they’re almost preferable.
They’re also more realistic, but who cares? It’s true that nations of the world have more than a few aces up their sleeves for dealing with planet-killers, and that the odds of us experiencing a scenario like the one Waugh lays out here are low. It’s also true that, likely or not, the sensations evoked by John and Allison’s mad race to get to Greenland, the place everyone’s heading to for safe harbor, are real: Stark fear at an unprecedented threat to their continued existence, and shock at the sheer inadequacy and ineptitude of the government’s extinction event planning. No one can fully account for that level of devastation, but they can certainly do better than whipping up panic that leads to chaos that leads to senseless waste of life. Through it, Butler and Baccarin play bewildered as each endures their own separate trials, pulling off the “common man” act necessary for the movie to work along the way.
Waugh’s decision to prioritize human drama over outrageous explosion porn does toe the line of self-serious miserablism at times; even films about the end of mankind have a limit to how dour things can get without raising eyebrows in disbelief. John, a skilled tradesman and not a fighter, gets into a desperate, sloppy exchange of blows with a pair of America first types, which works courtesy of the gracelessness of their fisticuffs and then stops working when he accidentally buries the claw end of a hammer into one of the men’s skulls. It’s stylized and framed for maximum shock value, and the artifice plays against the mood Waugh means to stir. On the other hand, the sappier midsection where Allison and John reunite at her father Dale’s (Scott Glenn) place works almost in spite of itself because that’s what good chemistry does to ham.
“Hi Dad,” Allison manages through happy tears. “Hey sunflower,” Dale says back. It’s such a natural exchange between Baccarin and Glenn that the choral soundtrack fades away, and it may help, too, that so many of us watching would give so much just to hug our own parents that the sentimentality is actually a feature rather than a bug. Look: There’s no ignoring “Greenland”s pedigree. Disaster movies are rarely great cinema. They’re rarely even good junk food. But this one’s just good enough and hits so close to how we’ve lived for most of 2020 that appreciating the way Waugh layers spectacle beneath Sparling’s dim view of humanity takes little persuading. “Greenland” isn’t some self-insistently timely movie and it probably isn’t the movie we “need” right now. But it’s the movie we have, and its honest to goodness but unintended genre resonance makes it easy to embrace. [C+]
“Greenland” arrives on VOD on December 18.