Greenland review

GREENLAND (2020) 

Director: Ric Roman Waugh

Stars: Gerard Butler, Morena Baccerin, Roger Dale Floyd

Runtime: 119mins

 

 

It's the end of the world as we know it. Only slightly cheaper than some previous ends of the world. We've seen this many times now and it's really only the variations on previous efforts that are interesting. 

 

The two most obvious references here are 2012 and War Of The Worlds (the Tom Cruise one). So we have a ground eye view of the coming disaster and a family striving to get to the last safe place on earth as civilisation crashes around them and other people behave badly. 

 

The threat to the earth this time is a comet passing close enough for bits to fall off. This leads to some pretty impressive scenes of flaming meteors crashing into things and blowing up. Not into famous things. No instantly-recognisable monuments are initially downed. But the flaming bits keep getting bigger and don'tcha know it there's going to be one so big it will lead to an "extinction level event". 

 

So Gerard, along with wife and kid, push everyone else out of their way because they've been chosen to go into one of the special bunkers that have been built in Greenland to save a few privileged people in the face of just such an event. Why the family qualify is never explained or questioned. Nor why you'd build these bunkers in Greenland. Can it be just a coincidence that Donald Trump tried to buy the country? Perhaps he saw an advance copy of this film and wanted to get in early...

 

Actually, the family being chosen was one of the neater touches: Gerard and family receiving word that they are to be saved while their friends won't be. But it's glossed over in seconds. What the hell, they ditch all their mates swiftly enough, kicking them to the curb while they quickly drive off, and then spend the rest of the film insisting that they deserve saving at the expense of everyone else. 

 

Franky I'd have left them to burn. Perhaps this is a subtle metaphor for white privilege, but if so the message is grab it with both hands, screw everyone else. 

 

Along the way there is increasing destruction, though nothing of the budget and scale of 2012, and the family meet the expected crazies a la War Of The Worlds. Of course it all becomes increasingly silly and the more it goes on the more you keep asking - why? What sort of world will be left anyway? Why should these people be saved? Why not just have a nice cup of tea and wait for the inevitable?