Greenland

 

This review may contain spoilers! 

 

An unfortunate blend of generic disaster movies and a bad run for Gerard Butler film choices lately make this one of the more forgettable films of 2020. I would give Greenland a 4/10.

 

Greenland follows structural engineer, John Garrity, a man who is flagged for emergency evacuation to Greenland alongside his family after an extinction-level comet threatens to break up and collide with Earth's surface. The film is at its peak right in the second act, when civil order has begun to crumble and mass hysteria has set in as people begin to realise that they're being left to die by their government. At this point the film is enhanced by splitting up our protagonists and placing them in dire, desperate situations. The main characters are marked as 'selected/priority evacuees' who are unable to make it onto a plane to Greenland, yet they still carry the wristbands which indicate their priority status. John's solo story sees him beset upon by a mob of people who covet his band, leading him to have to fight for his life and accidentally kill a man in self-defense. In a similar parallel, Allison Garrity is dragged out from the vehicle she is being transported in and her son kidnapped in an effort for her assailants to achieve priority status. These moments are uniquely harrowing scenes that actually change the characters and really cast the severity of the disaster scenario in a grim light. The cinematography for this movie knew how to make full effect of big set pieces and moments of action, while also toying with freehand shots for those moments of characters going through personal hardship or despair.

 

Morena Baccarin, who played Allison Garrity, was a strong leading role alongside Butler; I liked how Baccarin played a very competent mother in such a brutal survival setting. Andrew Bachelor, who played Colin, was one of the standout performances of the film; Bachelor embodied a genuine longing for the good of how the world used to be and sparked some hope in Butler's leading role.

However, the best performance came from Gerard Butler, who played John Garrity. A lot of Butler's roles stem from him being the most capable fighter in the room, your quintessential action hero. What I liked so much about John Garrity is that he functions well as a recognisable person struggling through very grounded personal reasons when we are introduced to him. Watching Butler doing his best to navigate a marriage that is crumbling apart while nurturing the bond he has with his son makes for an engaging performance. As the film descends into chaos and society begins crumbling you see this role's measured response steadily decline as he grows panicked at his inability to control the safety of himself or his family. As Butler's role deals with separation and loss he begins to take on this hardset determination to survive and recover his family at all costs, crossing a line that resounds pretty heavily with the nature of his character. Butler is comfortable leading a film and shows why he has been a leading man for years once again in this role that is a little outside his usual wheelhouse.

Greenland felt like it had several interesting ideas at work but was unable to break out with a disaster story that we hadn't seen hundreds of times before. The formula for the plot was exceptionally predictable; ordinary turned upside down followed by a chaotic human element as everyone scrabbles to survive en masse with the rest of the feature having the disaster positioned as the source of antagonism. The film has a light cast of characters, which means we're expected to find a very vanilla family story engaging for almost the entire time. But these aren't characters with exceptional qualities or attributes, there's no sub-plot that makes them better to watch. Eventually the characters have exhausted their potential but the film still has a significant amount of time to go. The disaster element of the feature is also pretty light, you never watch a scene in which the comet debris really feels like a threat to the characters. There always seems to be enough time to overcome a problem that stems from the disaster, another reason why the human element of the film is more interesting. The film also decides to resurface old plot points at extremely bizarre times; the marital problems between John and Allison Garrity being discussed and analysed at the start of the third act was a choice that really felt offbeat. The editing for this film set such a slow pace, I don't think I've seen a disaster movie with such slow moving sequences in a while. The score for Greenland is pretty classic blockbuster fanfare, boosting big sounds and horns when the action dials up but barely setting a pulse otherwise.

Roger Dale Floyd, who played Nathan Garrity, is quite a meek performer who lacks presence in his scenes; the character of Nathan is set up more as an object of the plot than an interesting role. Scott Glenn, who played Dale, might have found one of his most boring roles yet; Glenn's gruff nature and blind ignorance about the doomsday situation they're in is hard to like. Gary Weeks, who played Ed Pruitt, is quite a background role as the face of the neighbourhood cast in act one; Weeks' never finds a moment where his character really gets to engage with the main roles in a way that felt significant. Hope Davis and David Denman, who played Judy Vento and Ralph Vento respectively, don't manage to get away from the stereotypical immoral antagonists in a disaster/apocalyptic film; these characters feel so bland until they are charged up into undergoing an immoral act which defines them from there on out.