Greenland could be too efficient

Greenland is the most distant thing you can imagine from the spectacular Armageddon stories by Roland Emmerich or Michael Bay. We go into these films to deepen the mayhem over armies of cardboard cutouts, but Greenland dares to feel its disaster real and its people identified. It escapes enough to meet our disaster movie needs, but don't be surprised if Ric Roman Waugh's movie comes out too much at times, especially in an actual calamity along the way. To put it more simply, Greenland is not only efficient; sometimes it's too effective.

It's also a lovely showcase for star Gerard Butler, who may have become our most approachable movie star in the past decade and a half, the kind of person you love to see on screen. Butler enjoys portraying commonplace Joes doing their best (though he does sometimes penetrate male alpha slugs, including 300 and the insanely hilarious Coriolanus). Here he plays the recently estranged civil engineer John Garrity, who eagerly returned to the house he was recently evicted from by his wife Allison (Morena Baccarin) so he could attend their son Nathan's birthday party. The hot topic of the day is a giant comet called Clarke approaching Earth, but scientists assure the world that it will pass. Small pieces of comet tear apart the atmosphere, however, and John's neighbors gather around the TV in the living room to safely watch a country in the Atlantic. Instead, it ends up in Tampa, wiping out a fair bit of Florida, and suddenly, as the saying goes, shit becomes real. As a contractor, John discovers that he has been chosen by a mechanical and faceless government bureaucracy to fly his family in a secret military transport to an unknown bunker where a small number of people will seek refuge. against what is now it seems clear. It will be an extinction-level event. (You can guess where this secret bunker is.)

It may be just one story in the whole multi-character disaster extravaganza (in fact, it's no different from a 2012 Emmerich story), but Greenland has more in common with Rod Serling than Irwin Allen. When John's neighbors find out that he was chosen to survive and they didn't, they beg him to take them, or at least take their children. Director Waugh hugs and expands the drama without turning anyone into a practical villain - confused, scared people who don't know what to do. This idea rules much of Greenland. It's not a movie. Wouldn't it be great if ...? This is a movie. Wouldn't it be shit if ...?

But he's also strangely optimistic. While the Garrity's journey takes them through much of the country, the film introduces us to a society that is collapsing at the same time and functioning surprisingly well in some corners. Strangers are nice when you least expect it and most of you need it. (Some are less; it's still a disaster movie, after all.) Military bases were full of soldiers who were not selected to survive to operate with doomed efficiency. Everyone has a story, from a seemingly helpful couple on the street to a transportation coordinator at an airfield to a couple of random guys in a truck. A wonderfully experienced Scott Glenn appears as Allison's father. Holt McCallany introduces himself as he normally does. Waugh and writer Chris Sparling seem to understand that narrative comfort isn't narrative comfort when you go to the trouble of turning them into real characters, a lesson not all Hollywood filmmakers learn.

Waugh becomes our best writer for films that didn't have to be that good. It made Angel Has Fallen, the third (and in my opinion cheapest) entry in the Has Fallen range (also with a butler), something worth celebrating and can also claim to have given something away. rocking his best role. in the tense and moving traffic drama Snitch. The director's attention to detail on the ground serves him well in the action arena, both in combat (there's a nice truck shootout in Greenland) and in heightened tension. The first clues in this film that something is wrong are a glimpse of a distant army of jets in the sky and an automated call in the middle of a supermarket. 

Greenland (4K UHD)

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