We are accustomed when sit down to watch a disaster movie to the fact that spectacle, horrific, viscerally terrible spectacle, will win out over emotional nuance and robust, multi-dimensional characterisation almost every time.
It’s part of the deal from filmmakers of this genre – we give you a ringside seat to the end of the world, safe in the knowledge that when it’s done your normal life will resume, looking all the better for not perishing in a cataclysmically fiery hell or an explosive cometary impact, and in return you agree to the reality that there will be little to no authentic humanity clogging up the narrative.
That makes sense in a way; after all, we’re here to see things go boom, crash and bang, to bear witness to only the end of civilisation but to all the so-called certainties we buy into about life to help us get through the day without screaming into the void.
But the truth is, and Greenland, with impressively restrained eye by Ric Roman Waugh to a screenplay by Chris Sparling, gets this with every frame of its compelling running time, that these tales of doom and gloom are all the richer for putting people at the centre of the story who are more than one-dimensional stock characters.
Sure, it takes some extra time to let us into their world, to help us get to know them, but the result is a film that brims with a palpable sense of identifiable humanity as people react much as we would expect to, creating an identification with people in peril that you simply don’t get when there are no emotional access points to the action on the screen.
Greenland does this superbly, spending a surprising portion of its opening act – and it’s only surprising because so few disaster films do it – detailing exactly who the protagonists are and why we should give a damn about them and whether they survive the coming apocalypse.
As news hits the airwaves of a long-tailed comet coming in from another solar system, a rogue visitor the appearance of which is so sudden and so unstudied that everyone is guessing just what it will do when it comes perilously close to Earth, we see John Garrity (Gerard Butler) at his day job as a structural engineer overseeing the construction of a new building that we all know will be a smoking, crumpled ruin sooner rather than later.
He seems reluctant to go home, and only leaves work early at the urging of his foreman, and when he pulls up into his drive way and goes inside to see his estranged wife Alison (Morena Baccarin) it becomes clear why John was dragging his heels.
Things are AWKWARD between he and his wife, and why things are fine with his seven-year-old son Nathan (Roger Dale Floyd) who happily shows his dad his art and his insulin pump, it’s obvious that John and Allison, on the cusp of a reconciliation after his infidelity, have a long way to go before they are authentically happily married again.
Now, you may be thinking that the estranged protagonist and his wife is one of the oldest tropes going in this or any other genre and on the surface you would be right; but Sparling goes much further than the outskirts of this well-worn predictable trope by taking the time to let us see John and Allison as wounded people and not simply cardboard cutouts to be used as narrative fodder, an investment that pays off considerably when it becomes clear that the Clarks comet is going to miss Earth but rather usher in, with a rain of fiery hell from on high, the end of almost all life on Earth.
It’s the dinosaurs and 65 million years all over again but this time, it’s humanity staring into the freakishly final maw of extinction with very little to be done about it — unless you are selected, as John, Allison and Nathan are, to go to an enormous bunker in Greenland where the best and brightest of humanity will shelter and emerge after a period of hiding to rebuild the world.
Greenland is what happens when the heroics of Armageddon don’t do the job and real people, like the Garritys and their neighbours, have to stare into the hell that is the end of the world, with all the existential horrors that entails.
As you might expect, the drive to the airbase from where their plane ride to Greenland will depart does not go according to plan, and the film takes through the unexpected twists and turns, the shocking up and downs that come with any apocalyptic struggle for survival.
But here again, Greenland does not play to hackneyed type.
In a welcome departure from the usual disaster film fare, John and Allison are equal partners in their race to survive the end of all things, a refreshing change of pace that treats both parents as equally capable of dealing with pain and terror, and of finding a way to make their way through to the almost impossible to reach happy ever after.
As events race seemingly out of their control and comet fragments, some as big as football stadiums, destroy cities all across the world, all breathlessly reported by a media grappling, as is everyone, at the enormity of what this comet means for life on earth, we are thoroughly invested in where John, Allison and Nathan, who gets his own moment to shine when humanity does the expected and does evil in pursuit of self-survival, will end up.
These people matter, and while the spectacle is very much horrifyingly in place and we see, as expected, the very best and worst of humanity – when heroic things are done by the way, they are done in a way that suggests people simply doing what is compassionate and selflessly right as when John rescues a person from a car as molten lava fragments reign down upon a freeway full of sitting duck cars – we are invested because we bear witness to people like us reacting as we might.
It grants the film a luminously engaging human dimension that a great many disaster films lack, and while they are admitted a lot of voyeuristic fun to watch from the safety of your loungeroom or cinema seat, the truth is when they have as much authentic humanity in them as Greenland does, they are a thousand times more enjoyable to watch.
Greenland is a more than worthy addition to this experiential genre, delivering not simply spectacle, thrills and special effects galore, but an affecting sense of searing humanity, of real people like us in the firing line, bringing the story alive in ways that will not only have you on the edge of your seat but reach deep down into your soul as you confront your very worst fears in a way that feels uncomfortably real and rewardingly true to life.