6/3/2021 - Greenland (2020) - 5+/6-/10
Disaster movies, especially world-ending ones, are pretty formulaic. You know exactly what you will get: family melodrama, struggle to get from death to safety, fix it if you can, destruction spectacle on a mass scale. In these ways, Greenland no unicorn. It operates in the same fatalistic freight train that its brethren has whizzed by on. No, what makes this Gerard Butler vehicle work is its occasional adherences to reality and its lean thriller body, both elements beef up the drama to a “worthy watch” level.
Greeny is a reverse hourglass film; the beginning and ending are generally average and somewhat dumb, but the middle is robust, gritty, and stirring. There is a push pull in believable elements, with some chunks making your eyes roll, but the injections of believability add to the perpetuating thrust of tension. They deliver harrowing moments of proto-apocolyptica that work.
Everyone here does a fine job and though it won’t uproot your ideas of what this kind of film can be, but it will probably entertain more than what you might have expected.
