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
