Tag Archives: extinction

Movie Review – Greenland

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When I first watched the trailer for Amazon’s new, end-of-the-world disaster-flick Greenland I assumed it was a series, because so much action was crammed into those two electric minutes, spread over such a multitude of locations, that my unconscious brain must have doubted that two hours or less could do it proper justice. Unbeknownst to me, I was right about that.

Gerard Butler is John Garrity, a shit-the-bed husband desperately trying to get back into his wife’s good graces and keep his little, semi-nuclear family together. Unfortunately for him, just when things are looking good, a comet decides to pay a visit to earth. It quickly becomes apparent that the government’s official line about the fragments harmlessly burning up on entry are about as water-tight as the assurances he made to his wife about never cheating on her. In a couple of days’ time mankind faces an extinction-level event, a headline act that will be ably supported by various city-pulverising practice strikes.

John receives a presidential alert on his phone informing him that he, his wife Allison (Morena Baccarin) and diabetic son Nathan (Roger Dale Floyd) have been selected for extraction to a place of safety: a skills lottery the aim of which is to ensure that what’s left of mankind has the knowledge and resources to rebuild some semblance of civilisation in the wake of the disaster. As John inexplicably proceeds to enjoy a suburban get-together in the wake of this ominous message, the alert arrives again, this time appearing on his synched TV-screen for all his guests and neighbours to see. None of them have received an alert.

This is a delicious predicament in which to place our heroes. Will their hitherto mild-mannered neighbours run the scale from panicked to hostile to murderous? Will they try to block their escape, steal their place? Will John have to hurt or kill one of his former friends? The conflict is burned through in moments. It’s a pattern that’s repeated throughout the movie. This rise-and-burn of the movie’s plot points simultaneously encapsulates both the best and the worst thing about Greenland: namely that the dizzying array of moral quandaries and perilous scenarios thrown at the audience keep the film zooming along at a fast, furious and exciting pace, but the lack of time in which to explore and unpack the more interesting questions raised by these predicaments leaves the film occasionally feeling shallow. Again, a series format would have allowed for this, but maybe I’m just more of a TV guy.

The connective tissue that speeds these finger-click-fast scenarios along is made up of coincidences, cliché, and plot-holes so big you could steer a comet through them. Some of them you can excuse as being the inevitable consequence of a world held in panic’s grip, as with the couple who – after the Garrity family becomes separated thanks to a rather heartless government policy – steal Allison’s wrist-band and abduct Nathan, thinking they can gain access to an evacuation flight in the Garritys’ stead. Yes, it’s preposterous that the couple would believe their plan had a chance of succeeding, but people in the real world do much more blindingly dumb, desperate and delusional things under much less strenuous and apocalyptic conditions, so the plot-point doesn’t seem all that jarring. Much less forgivable is Allison managing to find Nathan again with relative ease, ditto with family’s separate journeys back to Allison’s father’s house. Everyone John meets in the chaos-stricken city in which he’s trapped is conveniently heading in almost precisely the direction he needs to go.

The family’s ultimate destination is Greenland, the location of the US government’s gargantuan fall-out shelters (I wonder if the denizens of Greenland had any say in the matter). John first learns about the location of these shelters from a kindly young man he shares a truck with on his way north; this man also tells him about alternative means of reaching Greenland by way of a civilian airfield in southern Canada. Greenland, then, is one of those rare movies that gives away the ending in its title. Not quite as egregious an offence as The Sixth Sense being called Bruce Willis is a Ghost, instead lying somewhere in severity between Jaws being called They Eventually Manage to Kill the Shark, and 10 Cloverfield Lane being called John Goodman is Right.

The hardest plot-hole to swallow is that the military, who have been mercilessly enforcing both a strict survivor quota and a screening program to keep out the chronically ill, would welcome a series of civilian flights arriving from Greenland with open arms, and not just instantly shoot them out of the sky.

Egregious implausibilities notwithstanding, listening to your inner-cynic and –critic simply isn’t the way to enjoy this movie.  Who in their right mind would select a disaster movie starring Gerard Butler, and then think to themselves, ‘I’m really looking forward to all of the realism and nuance in this one.’ The movie is a blockbuster, albeit one with a more modest budget than most, and seeks not to tinkle the intellect, but to thrill with spectacle, and entertain with edge-of-the-seat peril, providing just enough emotional heart and human stakes to make you care about the characters. Greenland ,then, meets its aims. Who cares if it’s occasionally schmaltzy or sometimes runs roughshod over reality? The performances are believable, the direction is tight and effective. It makes you feel panic, empathy, dread, hope, horror and happiness, and feel them big, sometimes in one short scene. No blockbuster in recent memory has made me involuntarily verbalise my feelings, in some cases incredibly loudly, quite as much as this one.

It’s also refreshing to find a modern movie that isn’t crushingly nihilistic (beyond the core premise of global annihilation itself, of course); bad people do bad things in times of duress, as do good people, and they certainly do here, but Greenland also showcases its fair share of quietly noble people content to go gently into that good night, because, after all, kindness and self-sacrifice is as much a marker of humanity as savage self-interest.

Though the ending is two-parts bleak to one-part hopeful, at least it doesn’t leave you facing the grim inevitability of a husband and wife having to fuck their own kids and grandkids in order to perpetuate the human race, like some other recent, extinction-themed movies we could mention. Looking at you, The Midnight Sky, you filthy animal.

Greenland is a good film – though I still think it would have made a genuinely great Limited Series. Perhaps it still will one day.

THREE AND A HALF STARS

We’ve got the whole world in our hands…

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Our planet is dying. At the very least it’s got a bad case of human-themed septicaemia. This is no longer a matter of Hollywood disaster-movie conjecture; it’s demonstrable scientific fact, as much as the industrialists, billionaires and corporatists scheme to deny it (it’s almost as if they have an ulterior motive or something).

Companies and industries only seem to work to reduce their carbon footprints when doing so will open up lucrative new revenue streams, or when they’re compelled to do so by an unbribable branch of authority. If every company with a potentially deleterious output had been trusted to undertake a cost-benefit analysis weighing the damage they cause to the planet against the maximum number of Bentleys and golden sceptres their shareholders could buy with the proceeds of their unbridled capitalist greed, then the human race today would be coughing up its scarred and blackened lungs, and then eating them to stay alive. There would be nothing else left to eat, presumably because all plant and animal life had been wiped out, Lorax-style, by Bob Dudley’s Need for Sneeds Emporium.

Thanks to a modicum of checks and balances, we’re coughing up our lungs, sure, but we haven’t yet been forced to eat them. We’re heading that way, though. We’re like frogs being brought to a boil in a pot, or turkeys counting down the days to Christmas.

Which begs the question…

Why haven’t we gone full French on the world’s ass? Why aren’t we pulling industrialists out of their gas-guzzling limos, stringing up CEOs of country-stripping companies from the ends of eco-friendly lamp-posts, or storming parliaments dressed as armed trees to demand action and change? I’m not advocating that we do any of these things, Mister MI5 and Senior CIA, and I’m certainly too lily-livered and self-involved to spearhead such movements. I’m just saying that, historically-speaking, for shit to get done in this world, someone usually has to get, well… done.

The French Revolution, the American Revolution, the US Civil War, the Russian Revolution: the run-up to these seismic events involved very little in the way of amusing placards or people marching the streets in floral-patterned cagoules. And the stakes weren’t as high then, because they’ve literally never been higher: the earth is dying.

Human beings the world over are being poisoned to death on a hitherto unimaginable scale by dick-swinging, money-amassing destroyers of worlds, who sail around in their million-pound yachts as beneath them sink the corpses of a billion dead fish and an embarrassment of bubble-wrapped whales. Donald Trump, as both a president and a (supposedly inert) CEO, is representative of this fatally-escalating trend towards greed and mass-death. It’s hard to imagine a person like Trump ever, ever, ever, ever stopping doing what he’s doing. Even once the planet is dead, hard-nosed industrialists and financiers like him will doubtless be selling oxygen canisters and pots of cress to our mutant ancestors at a million pounds a time.

Tough-talking, populist politicians, of the variety that are sweeping the globe right now, are more likely to be corrupt, callous and power-hungry; vessels with rich backers who have no time for nuance or nurturing. They want to get shit done. They don’t care about red-tape or the environment. They just want to make money, money, money, and won’t allow anything to get in the way of that impulse, even the death of literally everything on earth. The voters these populists attract are more likely to be angry, uneducated and malleable. It’s all too easy for the string-pullers to encourage the angry mob to turn a blind eye to their leaders’ corruption, contradiction and propensity for planet-raping by promising them that their enemies will be crushed: enemies that unscrupulous idealogues in the media will be all too happy to hold up for closer inspection, or simply invent; totem-poles to the rage of the underclass.

So what the hell can we do about all this? How can we save ourselves?

We can march, of course, (cagoules optional) substituting obstruction and media coverage for blood. We can block the roads and city centres with demonstrations comprising hordes of determined do-gooders. Unfortunately, head-line grabbing demos like the ones carried out by Extinction Rebellion don’t tend to generate much in the way of positive media coverage. Hardly surprising, really, since media companies tend to be owned by millionaires and billionaires, and thus are spectacularly unlikely to provide coverage that might compromise, or create agitation around, the activities and profits of power companies and major arms’ manufacturers in which their owners and their pals might have an interest (except, perhaps, where it might embarrass or disgrace an economic or political rival).

The largely one-sided nature of the media discourse has the rather perverse effect of placing millions of ordinary Joes and Joannes shoulder to shoulder with the very bastards who’d happily watch them burn to death if the situation demanded it. Or even just for a laugh. Thus, while a lot of blue- and -white collar workers may broadly support the aim of Extinction Rebellion – i.e. the aim of making sure that we don’t all choke to death on our own soot-flavoured, carcinogenic phlegm – they won’t necessarily tolerate any disruption to their daily lives in order to achieve it.

In one sense, this is laughably bizarre. It’s like over-hearing a peasant during the French Revolution moaning about the push towards democracy making him late for work: ‘I can hardly bloody move in this town for the angry, liberated masses hunting down the royal family to punish them for their autocratic, imperialist excesses. If I don’t get this bloody cart-load of turnips to Le Havre by 5 o’clock I’ll never be home in time for my evening class, ‘Cooking with Rats.’’

In another sense, I can completely understand the ordinary citizen’s irritation and cynicism. People have to get to work. They have families to feed, people to help, hospital appointments to attend. So a town being brought to a halt might rather piss them off, whatever the supposed stakes. And the people most responsible for the earth’s destruction – the aforementioned billionaires and industrialists – are also those least likely to be affected by an Extinction Rebellion protest: ‘Oh no, they’ve blocked some roads in Sidcup and Hull. That’s really going to make it difficult for me to reach the arms expo in my sonic helicopter.’

Plus, even if we do manage to bring our barons of industry to heel and get them to clean up their acts, won’t the world still be doomed if we can’t control the carbon emissions coming from economic power-houses like the US and China, or from emerging industrial economies like India and Brazil? It’s about as hopelessly futile as diligently tidying and sweeping your garden every day when your next-door neighbour has taken to burning six-tonnes of plastic every day in theirs.

No-one said changing the paradigm would be easy. Protests and demonstrations don’t change the world over-night. They weave themselves into the public consciousness, into magazines, documentaries, books and movies. We’re all connected in this new digital age, so lessons learned in this country are easily imparted to peoples the world over. Well, maybe not the peoples suffering under the iron rule of brutal, totalitarian regimes who won’t even let them switch the internet on, but, hey: not even brutal, totalitarian regimes last forever. Movements, empires, peoples, and cultures are all eventually swept aside by the glacially-paced, inexorable force of history. At one point the people of the US thought that slavery was an indispensable plank of their economy and culture. Hopefully one day we’ll view pollution and climate change in the same way.

In the here and now we have to push things towards tipping point, piece by piece, through grass-roots movements, education, music, movies and peaceful – though occasionally obstructive – collective action. I say ‘we’. My collective action pretty much begins and ends with this article, and in the cross I choose to put on the ballot-paper once every two to four years. Oh, and I’ve noticed that saving the world appears to involve my wife being able to shout at me for a wider range of things than ever before. ‘Don’t buy the plastic-wrapped bananas, are you trying to choke a whale to death? Turn that light off, you’ll melt an ice-cap!’ It often feels futile, but it’s all about the tipping point, baby. That’s what I keep telling myself, anyway, as I sit in my house, next to perhaps one of the biggest gas and petro-chemical refineries in the country. Recycle, Jamie. Don’t spray that deodorant for too long. Don’t idle the car engine…

I salute those with the drive, gumption, vision and free time to save the world, even if it’s only in installments. The only problem might be that we’re already too late. That the world is already in stage four, and there’s no stage five. In that case, all is still not lost. Human history is littered with examples of human ingenuity and genius changing and saving the world, just at the right time. We only have to hope that we’ll do it again, that some era-defining invention or scientific discovery will emerge, for which he don’t yet have a frame of reference or the means to be able to anticipate or predict.

Three hundred years ago we ran around with swords and muskets, routinely dying of the littlest of maladies. Now we orbit the earth, build robots and terraform deserts. I’m hopeful that we can pull ourselves back from the brink.

Hopeful. But still ferociously sceptical.

Riot gear and gas masks on stand-by.