Review: Greenland Amazon Original

Gerard Butler and Morena Baccarin star. A family of three try to get from Kentucky to Greenland before an extinction level event meteor hits Earth.

I was super pumped for this after I saw the trailers. Disaster movie, meteors crashing into the Earth, Gerard Butler doing Gerard Butler things. But then I watched it.

Sure, it’s a disaster movie, but in actuality it’s more of a family drama where things happen because, “we need to up the stakes” without any reason or context. For example, early in the movie, the mom and son are in a drugstore like Shoppers Drugmart or CVS, looking for insulin. People are everywhere looting but it’s peaceful, ie no one is shooting, there’s no fighting. Everyone is just running around stealing stuff and looking guilty about it.

Then this random group of people come in and just start shooting the place up. They kill an old woman.

There’s no police, no one is challenging them… they just walk in and start shooting. Worse still, they’re all young black men. I mean in 2021 after everything that happened last year. Oh, sorry, one of the young black men helps the mom and her son get out of the pharmacy… so I guess that makes it okay?

I get from the characters perspective it makes no sense but from a viewers perspective the lack of context makes it frustrating and annoying. Why are they shooting the place up? Why did they kill an old woman? Why is any of this happening? Who okay’d this?

Things like this happen regularly throughout. Things happen, no rhyme or reason, just to up the stakes.

My biggest issue though, I didn’t care about this family.  For a viewer to be invested, they need to care about the protagonist and I found myself wanting to see more destruction because it was more interesting than what was happening to this family, at least close to the destruction would have made me go “oh damn, they’re in trouble” but no, it’s just this vague, oh it’s gonna happen soon but watch these people make terrible choices and have random acts of awful happen to them.

They are separated for a valid reason, but then the plot requires them to be separated for a long time, so contrived scenarios happen to keep them apart.

This is not the next great disaster movie we’ve been waiting for. Morena Baccarin and Gerard Butler do a fine job with what they are given, though angry wife is angry and that is her character, which annoyed me as well. The kid is fine as a seven year old…I guess. Oh yeah, the credits mention Glenn Scott so you’re like, sweet, at least it’ll be good when he’s on screen. He has maybe 10mins screen time, and it’s… okay.

Directed fine. Special effects look good. Like, all the competencies of movie making are there, it just doesn’t work because of the narrative and the liberties it takes.

There are worse ways to spend two hours, but there are also better ways.

Spoilers

John is a structural engineer in Kentucky. He’s on the outs with his wife, we don’t find out why until waaaaay into the second act, (he slept with another woman) maybe the start of the third. The reveal is meaningless at that point. Anyway…

John gets “selected” because he can build things and his wife and son get to go too. Where? It’s a mystery. Just get to a particular airport by 945pm.

At the airport they realize the kid’s meds fell out of his bag in the car so, John goes to get them. The son and wife continue through the process until he is denied because he has diabetes.

Then a whole bunch of nonsense happens that doesn’t matter and you don’t care about, except when the meteors hit.

They get together, of course find their own way to the bunker in Greenland then the massive meteor hits. We get shots of different cities and the devastation. Cut to black. Did they make it? What happened? At this point I was talking at the TV, “how dare you not have the balls to show me what happened to them after the last two hours!”

But then it fades in. Radio transmissions of other bunkers. A blast door opens. There stands John with his family looking at the destruction. So it’s some sort of special window right? Nope. It’s just open space. A planet killer meteor, bigger than the one that killed the dinosaurs, crashed into western Europe and it only took EIGHT MONTHS for the dust to settle!? What?! Oh and a couple birds fly by… EIGHT MONTHS LATER. Ridiculous.

A final shot of the Earth rotating in space shows where all the impact craters are and the huge one that western Europe, except, there was a shot of Paris, a half melted Eiffel Tower clearly visible… so… what?

Skip it… unless you really wanna see it.