Film of the Week: Greenland

Where would we be without disaster movies? Now and again we feel the urge to grab our popcorn, sit back, and be entertained by high-adrenaline action from start to finish. A volcano erupting, an earthquake levelling an entire city, or a tidal wave hell-bent on washing everything away - sometimes we need a break from the emotionally driven stories and focus on nothing but action. But what happens when a disaster movie tries to also be emotionally driven, too? Should the two story-driven ideas mix? Will we be entertained? Would the edge of our seats be cold as we remain still in the centre of them? Well, Greenland tries to answer those questions and provides us generally favourable answers in the form of a surprisingly entertaining action-based and emotionally-driven story.

The action starts when it’s revealed the Earth’s scientists made a mistake when predicting where the meteorite would land. Instead of in the ocean, it hit basically everywhere but, and that’s quite a mistake considering 70% of the Earth’s surface is covered in water. The world simultaneously learns they’re going to experience an extinction level threat and they must race against time to reach safety in the form of Greenland’s underground bunkers built specifically to deflect the shockwave generated by a nine-mile wide meteorite, named Clarke.

grerard Butler, Morena Baccarin, and Roger Dale Floyd play John, Allison, and Nathan Garrity, and when John receives a strange phone call from the Government insisting that his family reach safety immediately, at first they’re confused until they see the first of Clarke’s pieces slam into Tampa, Florida, wiping out the entire city in seconds. Panic ensures and the Garrity family are now on a mission to reach Greenland.

In almost every disaster movie, that’s all the plot points you need to keep us glued to our screens as an occasional impact strike from small meteorites before the inevitable final impact hits will keep us reaching for our popcorn and on the edge of our seats. But in Greenland, we get all the ingredients we are used to seeing in a disaster movie, but with a few extra pieces in the form of an emotion. So much emotion, in fact, the main ingredient, the disaster part within the disaster movie takes to the back seat and we’re finding ourselves focusing on a family who are determined to stay together through thick and thin, whilst fighting for survival. At times when it seems that the odds are stacked against them, they pull through at the last minute. It’s an emotionally-driven disaster movie, and that makes it the most realistic disaster movie we’ve had for quite some time, since 2012’s Seeking a Friend for the End of the World. So, does that mean we won’t get a decent emotionally-driven disaster movie for another nine years?

If that’s the case, I’m confident in saying that we’ll have a plethora of disaster movies that purely focus on the disaster part of the story to keep us entertained for when the next emotionally-driven disaster movie comes along.

Thanks for reading

Antony Hudson

(TonyHadNouns)