Angel
Has Fallen director
Ric Roman Waugh’s Greenland is another disaster porn flick about a comet
on a collision course with Earth ala Deep Impact or Armageddon
except that this one stars Gerard Butler and was from Chris Sparling who wrote Gus
Van Sant’s poorly received The Sea of Trees. Judging from the trailer alone, this is
pretty run of the mill fare but thanks to an already very real ongoing pandemic
which delayed the release numerous times, the film became a minor hit during a
time when theaters were shuttered and pictures can barely break even. Plus this one’s got some surprising turns
from Scott Glenn and Hope Davis in it.
Engineer
John Garrity (Butler) and his distant wife Allison (Morena Baccarin) life
together with their diabetic son Nathan (Roger Dale Floyd). On his downtime he gazes upon the near-Earth
passing comet Clarke in the skies above.
One morning, John receives a mysterious phonecall indicating he and his
family have been selected for emergency sheltering in anticipation of the comet
Clarke’s apparent collision course with Earth, expected to cause an event that
will wipe out all animal and human life.
Thus begins the family’s ordeal and uphill battle as they struggle to
find the boarding site and are hit with one disaster movie obstacle after the
next.
For an
end of the world movie, Greenland is a tightly budgeted CGI fest though
some shots of an impending fire cloud and wide shots of the Earth riddled with
newly rendered craters are visually exciting.
Gerard Butler’s, let’s be honest, a schlock actor in a schlock movie but
he does a serviceable job playing the heroic leading man. The film takes a brief detour with the
arrival of Hope Davis as a helpful bystander while secretly harboring an
ulterior motive. Still, Greenland is
mostly a showcase for the film’s visual effects sequences of fragments of the
comet destroying everything in their path.
Compared
by critics to Steven Spielberg’s own War of the Worlds for how it views
the disaster through the eyes of an everyman trying to protect his family, Greenland
is a decently made technical distraction for two hours offering up an end
of the world scenario at a time when mankind faced its biggest threat in over a
century. It won’t offer anything you
haven’t already seen before but it proves to be a good way to kill two
hours. If nothing else it is far better
than most of what we’re used to seeing Gerard Butler in.
--Andrew Kotwicki