Directing: B
Acting: B
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+
Special Effects: B+

Strange direction I’m going in this week, moving from Little Fish to Greenland—in the world of cinema, moving from a disastrous global virus to a global cataclysm. At least in Little Fish everyone just loses their memory; in Greenland most of the world dies.

That’s no a spoiler, as it’s beside the point of Greenland—the title referring to the location of a deep-underground bunker used to save select humans from an extinction-level event. Shades of the 2009 movie 2012 there. The event here is a comet, a hunk of mass several miles wide headed straight for Earth, preceded by other meteorites of varying size, causing varying degrees of damage, including the wiping out of cities. In that sense, it’s an update on the 1998 film Armageddon. It’s just not dumb as shit.

Greenland might not quite qualify as “fun,” the way the similar blockbusters of two decades ago like Armageddon or Deep Impact (also 1998) were intended to be. This movie is much more unsettling in tone, a few steps closer to realism, the fiery hellscape falling from the sky more often in the background, a backdrop for the story of a couple and their young son trying to survive as the natural world is torn apart around them. Some of these scenes, as staged by director Ric Roman Waugh, brought to mind the panicked crowds featured in Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds (2005). Both films have a particular interest in the human effects of disaster, rather than in the shock and awe of the disaster itself.

And this means the actual imagery of meteorites hitting the earth, in Greenland, is used sparingly, and it is an effective tactic. This is clearly a film with a fraction of the budget of those earlier blockbusters; it was made with $35 million. But Waugh makes all of those dollars count, and when we do get brief shots of a fiery sky, or of molten meteorites raining down on a highway, it makes a longer lasting impact (no pun intended).

It’s a good thing, too, because to be frank, the Garrity family—John, Allison, and young Nathan—just isn’t that interesting. The “plot,” such as it is, still suffers in the same way plots in these movies always do: details shoehorned in to give us a select few characters to care about, who somehow beat the kind of odds that would never be beaten in a similar real-life scenario. John and Allison are estranged, with the most basic marital problems imaginable. Will disaster bring them closer together again? I’m on the edge of my seat! Young Nathan is a diabetic kid, and his need for regular medication is the inciting event that creates extra challenges, without which we would not have the slightest interest in following these characters through such extraordinary circumstances.

Now I’m going to bring up something that might put off some readers with its “wokeness,” and I don’t care! The couple is played by Gerard Butler and Morena Baccarin—both white. How is that relevant, you ask? Well, they live in Atlanta—a city that is 54% Black. If the main characters here were from, say, Seattle or Portland, then their being white would be pretty much expected, just in terms of odds. No doubt Greenland is largely set in Georgia because Atlanta is such a huge epicenter of movie and television production, but if the couple has to be white, the least writer Chris Sparling could do is make them interesting. I guarantee you that there are countless other Black couples in Atlanta whose stories moving through this landscape would be far more compelling. (To be fair, countless other white couples would also be far more interesting.) And it’s not just that the principal characters are white; it’s that combined with the fact that Black people even among supporting characters barely exist, and of course one of the two with speaking parts winds up dead. These are details that reveal the subtle effects of white supremacy, something the filmmakers probably didn’t even realize was at play, but they should be paying more deliberate attention. In Atlanta, of all places.

So, in short, Greenland is far from perfect. When is any disaster movie going to be? Flaws aside, there’s still something to be said for its tone and approach, almost procedural in its observance of people struggling to survive in lethal circumstances. I suppose whether that’s better or if it’s better for a disaster movie to be just fun, escapist entertainment is up for debate. I also gave 2012 a solid B, after all, and that movie was straight-up preposterous on every level. But, the movie still succeeded on its own terms, terms which were different than those at play here. Greenland may still be just another disaster movie, but it’s going for something different. In certain ways it succeeds within those parameters, and it certain ways it doesn’t. If you love the thrill of disaster onscreen, it does offer several effective doses of that particular fix.

Overall: B