Greenland
Directed by Ric Roman Waugh
Produced by Gerard Butler, Basil Iwanyk, Sébastien Raybaud, Alan Siegel
Written by Chris Sparling
Starring Gerard Butler, Morena Baccarin, Roger Dale Floyd, Scott Glenn, David Denman, Hope Davis
Music by David Buckley
Cinematography Dana Gonzales
Edited by Gabriel Fleming
Production companies Thunder Road, Anton, G-Base
Distributed by STX Films
End-of-the world disaster movies, by the tropes of their own genre, are self-limiting. You know the world will end. You know the protagonists (usually a small family with one or two young children) will escape a half-dozen hair-breath escapes from doom and be saved at the last moment. The kindly uncle or helpful scientist will meet a gruesome death. There will be a cast of thousands, running screaming, making jazz hands and dying like relief pitchers for the Orioles. There will be a handful of noble, courageous people who help the family in one way or another. The special effects will range from awesome to ridiculous.
There isn’t any real bottom to the ridiculous, and most disaster movies end up as bait for Jonah and the ‘bots on MS3TK. (“Wow! That thermonuclear explosion was only fifty feet away! Just lucky we had the drapes drawn!”)
There are ways to avoid such a fate. First, make the disaster plausible. Make it something that not only can happen, but eventually will. None of this “all the neutrons in the universe suddenly acquired a positive charge” stuff that will cause anyone with a high school education to get up and walk out. Comets, asteroids, solar flares and nuclear wars are all good for disaster movies.
Strike a balance between the scale of the disaster and the immediate effect it has upon your protagonists. If your viewpoint characters don’t stand out from the Japanese cast pirated from a Moth-Ra movie, you won’t engage your viewers. Similarly, having them sitting around in a bomb shelter talking about how horrible it must be outside is going to bore people to tears.
In some cases, the only real drama is whether the disaster will happen or be averted at the last minute. Just remember that having Clint Eastwood ride a bomb to the asteroid to divert it works only if the asteroid is several months away, and logistically cannot possibly work if the comet is only ten seconds from striking the Earth. Again, unless your target audience is eight years old, some plausibility is needed.
Greenland checks all the right boxes, making it the best disaster movie I’ve seen in quite some time. The core family are both human and engaging. The disaster (a mostly-calved comet that is now thousands of chunks rather than a discrete whole) is plausible, even likely over time, and passes the scientific test of “could it happen?” The special effects are both eye-popping and credible. No 747s flying on their sides to traverse a huge crack that has just opened in the Earth’s crust or silly stuff like that. If an explosion occurs near an aircraft, the aircraft falls down, goes boom. The drama is refreshingly uncontrived (the only countdown is in a situation where a countdown makes perfect sense, and occurs after the plot resolution).
One of the most human and striking moments is when the mother is begging a army sergeant to let her child on an escape plane. Increasingly desperate, she wheedles with the sergeant, a young woman: “Can’t you just put him in your lap when it’s your turn to go?” The sergeant calmly responds, “I’m not going. I wasn’t selected. None of us,.” she gestures to show the rest of the military personnel, “…were selected. Nor were our families. We’re volunteers.” It’s a deeply touching and intimate moment amongst the rapidly spreading chaos.
If you like disaster movies, you’ll love this one. If you aren’t real keen on the genre, then here’s one where they didn’t screw it all up. There is one fairly big plot hole at the end, genre-driven rather than bad writing, but I’ll leave it to the viewers to spot.
Just a very well-done movie, fun to watch.