greenland movie review

Didn't you get the email?

By joining, you agree to the Terms and Policies and Privacy Policy and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

username@email

By continuing, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

Log in or sign up for Rotten Tomatoes

Trouble logging in?

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes.

Email not verified

Let's keep in touch.

Sign up for the Rotten Tomatoes newsletter to get weekly updates on:

Upcoming Movies and TV shows
Rotten Tomatoes Podcast
Media News + More

By clicking "Sign Me Up," you are agreeing to receive occasional emails and communications from Fandango Media (Fandango, Vudu, and Rotten Tomatoes) and consenting to Fandango's Privacy Policy and Terms and Policies . Please allow 10 business days for your account to reflect your preferences.

OK, got it!

About Rotten Tomatoes®
Login/signup

Movies in theaters

Opening This Week
Top Box Office
Coming Soon to Theaters
Certified Fresh Movies

Movies at Home

Fandango at Home
Prime Video
Most Popular Streaming Movies
What to Watch New

Certified fresh picks

88% Wicked Link to Wicked
90% The Order Link to The Order
96% Beatles '64 Link to Beatles '64

New TV Tonight

64% Secret Level: Season 1
-- Dexter: Original Sin: Season 1
-- Bookie: Season 2
-- No Good Deed: Season 1
-- Dream Productions: Season 1
-- The Great British Baking Show: Holidays: Season 7
-- Queer Eye: Season 9
-- Paris & Nicole: The Encore: Season 1
-- Die Hart: Season 3

Greenland Reviews

Greenland may not add anything fresh or new to the very over-done genre of disaster movies, yet it provides two hours of fun and entertaining escapism. Gerard Butler is better than he's been in a while.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 6, 2023

In the end, Greenland is predictably underwhelming, packing only a couple of genuinely exciting sequences, and a decent cast.

Full Review | Original Score: D+ | Jul 24, 2023

Butler’s most affecting performance in years... Greenland presents the end of the world as we know it in a mighty fine and entertaining way.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 12, 2022

A surprisingly grounded disaster movie featuring Gerard Butler’s best performance in years. The thought-provoking premise and emotional focus elevate this above other movies in this popular subgenre.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Sep 27, 2022

A remarkable combination of downright dullness and eye-rolling coincidences.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Sep 9, 2022

It’s one of Butler’s best films in years; one that takes the familiar end-of-the-world idea and uses it to explore human nature in a surprisingly thoughtful way.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 21, 2022

For most of its runtime, "Greenland" surprises at just about every opportunity. It continually takes every decision that a mindless disaster movie might make and does the complete opposite.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Jul 7, 2022

It does a good job of masquerading as something deeper than your average disaster fare.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 17, 2022

Believable characters keep the story grounded (this is head-and-shoulders above Gerard Butler's ordinary, two-dimensional fare).

Full Review | Sep 17, 2021

If this isn't exactly how the end of the world will happen, the way [Greenland's] characters learn about the film's cataclysm at least feels eerily believable.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 16, 2021

The movie wants to be on the same scale as War of the Worlds, World War Z or Roland Emmerich's movies, but at a fraction of the budget.

Full Review | Original Score: B- | Aug 10, 2021

By focusing on the stories and lives of people on the ground in favour of a more crash, bang, wallop approach, Greenland offers genuine thrills.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 17, 2021

But with a seemingly never-ending pandemic making a non-bunkered lifestyle difficult, if not impossible, until sometime next year, a pre- and post-apocalyptic thriller feels reassuring.

Full Review | Jun 8, 2021

Greenland [is] no under-the-radar masterpiece waiting to be discovered. Still, there's plenty of space to appreciate a low-budget B movie exceeding expectations.

Full Review | Jun 5, 2021

There are enough quietly compelling moments and plenty of fine performances to justify Greenland as passable entertainment.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Mar 25, 2021

Waugh's film feels like too much, especially in the final act, when the personal is replaced by the plodding.

Full Review | Original Score: C+ | Mar 17, 2021

At first, I thought someone had played a practical joke on me.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Mar 9, 2021

The scenes of rioting resemble the news footage that accompanied the reign of President Trump. It was probably unintentional, but the similarities are startling, with the film evoking Americans at war with each other, a theme that is uncomfortably timely.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 7, 2021

Sure, there are plenty of explosions and breathtakingly horrifying sequences involving cities being annihilated by fragments of the comet, but the panic-fueled tension at the center of Greenland comes from the real human stakes driving its narrative.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 22, 2021

If you can ignore the at-times-laughable script this is a skilled, very dark and surprisingly effect disaster movie. (Blu-ray Review).

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Feb 18, 2021

How Greenland Shows the Exact Way to Make a Good Disaster Film

I wouldn’t go as far as to call “ Greenland ” a masterpiece but it’s certainly one of the biggest cinematic surprises in a while. It spent three weeks in theaters without much fanfare here in Mexico until they shut down again this weekend. This makes sense, after all, not many people were going to risk a trip to the cinema during a pandemic for another seemingly unremarkable Gerard Butler action movie. Thankfully, word of mouth spread in time for me to watch it before it was too late. This is the type of feature where several of the scares come from the sound mix and great visuals. It demands to be seen with the right sound system and on the big screen.

Whatever its flaws and limitations, I see “Greenland” as the poster boy for Ebert’s rule of “It’s not what the movie is about, but how it is about it.” The film shares more than a few elements with the two members of the “gigantic earth busting comet movie” genre (“ Deep Impact ” and “ Armageddon ,” both from 1998), and on the surface it seems even closer to Roland Emmerich ’s “2012.” But “Greenland” is set apart from all of them with its very different attitude.

Directed by Ric Roman Waugh , the film deals with the events leading to the appearance of Comet Clarke, a spectacular moment that appears harmless enough until several clues make it clear that something bigger is on the way. Skyscraper builder (and thus essential worker) John Garrity (Gerard Butler) is recruited along with his estranged wife Allison ( Morena Baccarin ) and son Nathan ( Roger Dale Floyd ) for a flight to Greenland where shelters were built years ago for just such an occasion; they spend a good deal of the movie facing one believable setback after another. They’re a family unit in crisis, reminiscent of the one Spielberg created in “ War of the Worlds ” (2005).

Few things have been as frustrating to me as Hollywood’s recent inability to make a good disaster film, despite coming up with truly groundbreaking SFX technology. “2012” is a good example of the philosophy that the more realistic visual effects have become, the less believable that disaster films have turned out to be. Other predecessors of “Greenland” have all made the same mistake: they never take themselves even remotely seriously, and their makers see them as mere roller coaster rides designed to sell popcorn. In that regard some may have succeeded, but I will never understand the point of making a movie about the end of the world if the audience never really gets the feel what it would be like to live through such an event.

Most of Emmerich’s recent disaster entries have shared the same tendency to create over-the-top characters whose attitudes have nothing to do with what’s going on around them, and who have relationships that make it too easy to determine who lives and who dies (case in point: Amanda Peet ’s doomed boyfriend in “2012”). Even the supposedly frightening characters in these movies have turned out to be complete duds, unlike what we get here in “Greenland.” Just compare Woody Harrelson ’s mad prophet form “2012” to the bearded, overweight everyman in “Greenland” whose unpredictable, and terrifying nature is only revealed as we slowly come to realize that his best interest may not necessarily align with those of the leads. When it comes to its character’s attitudes “Greenland” is much more reminiscent to the disaster films of the 1970s than to the rest of the movies mentioned above. The characters here are much more believable as well. They panic to the point of doing things they would have never guessed, like leaving behind their beloved neighbor’s children to their sad fates, and they make the normal mistakes that regular people would make in a situation like this (ex.: one suitcase allowed” actually means one suitcase per family).

Director Waugh makes Clarke the comet a truly frightening menace not unlike what Spielberg achieved with Bruce the shark decades before, and wisely takes the same approach in introducing its full dimension little by little. Every death in this movie is deeply felt, and is not just put aside a couple of scenes later. The characters in “Greenland” don’t act as if they were on a roller coaster ride but rather as if in a situation where they’re fighting for their lives every step of the way. Take for instance a sequence when the leading man can’t avoid facing a couple of crazies, and we then see his stunned reaction at realizing he’s capable of the unimaginable. In these most difficult times, a movie like “Greenland” can actually help you put your personal problems in perspective if only for a couple of hours. That is the best compliment I can imagine for an entry of this nature.

All of the above is not to say that the movie doesn’t include its share of apocalyptic film clichés. After all, what would a disaster entry be without a leading couple living through a marital crisis that will inevitably be solved, much as in “The Abyss,” “Twister,” “2012,” and so on? And how could “Greenland” possibly convey immediate doom without the usual sky full of ominously flying birds? And what would a film like this be without all the crisis associated with the typical ill child in dire need of medication, just as in in “World War Z,” “Signs,” and what have you? At least the filmmakers made this last dilemma integral to the plot.

Still, I’m also a bit skeptical about the plausibility of building all these shelters in the remote lands of Greenland since logic dictates nothing would stop a comet from colliding directly with Earth precisely in that region. We also have to look past all these incredible coincidences that need to take place for the characters to remain together and crash land just a couple of miles from their destination (much as it happened in “2012”). But “Greenland” is so convincing, we don’t really care too much about these weaknesses.

Waugh’s film will likely be remembered as a special effects movie, but they wouldn’t achieve the same result without actors and a director to sell them to the audience, such as in the ending sequence which features scenes from destroyed cities around the world. When my hometown’s presidential palace in ruins turned up, I have to admit that it received cheers from all four audience members. It was for all the wrong reasons, but also for all the right ones.

After watching “Greenland” I was especially surprised to see how well Butler comes off by adding some vulnerability to his character. Maybe Butler has found his true niche in this genre, much like Liam Neeson did with the “special set of skills” character from “Taken” over a decade ago. After all these years of complaining and writing on this site about half a dozen pieces on the problem with the recent disaster films, one viewing of “Greenland” has left me with nothing more to say about the subject. It shows the exact way to make a really good one.

Gerardo Valero

Gerardo Valero is lives in Mexico City with his wife Monica. Since 2011 he’s been writing a daily blog about film clichés and flubs (in Spanish) on Mexico’s Cine-Premiere Magazine . His contributions to “Ebert’s Little Movie Glossary” were included in the last twelve editions of “Roger Ebert’s Movie Yearbook.”

On the Hidden Power of “The Hill of Secrets”

Transcending Hell on Earth in Larisa Shepitko’s “The Ascent”

A Moment in the Spotlight: On The King of Comedy

No Easy Answers: On the Power of The Teachers’ Lounge

Popular reviews.

It’s What’s Inside

The Last of the Sea Women

A Different Man

The best movie reviews, in your inbox.

Things you buy through our links may earn Vox Media a commission.

Greenland Might Actually Be Too Effective

Greenland is the furthest thing you can imagine from the schlock-spectacular Armageddon narratives of a Roland Emmerich or a Michael Bay. We go to those movies to enjoy elaborate mayhem visited upon armies of cardboard characters, but Greenland dares to make its catastrophe feel real and its people feel relatable. It’s just escapist enough to fill our disaster-flick needs, but don’t be surprised if Ric Roman Waugh’s film sometimes feels like too much, especially in the middle of an ongoing real-life calamity. To put it a simpler way: Greenland is not just effective; sometimes it’s too effective.

It also makes for a terrific showcase for star Gerard Butler, who has, over the past decade and a half or so, perhaps become our most accessible movie star , the kind of guy you’re just happy to see onscreen. Butler likes to portray rough average Joes trying to do their best (though he does make the occasional foray into alpha-male spittlefests, most notably in 300 and the dementedly enjoyable Coriolanus ). Here, he plays recently separated construction engineer John Garrity, who has eagerly returned to the house from which he was recently kicked out by his wife, Allison (Morena Baccarin), so he can attend their son Nathan’s birthday party. The hot topic of the day is a giant comet called Clarke, which is approaching Earth but will, scientists reassure the world, pass us by. Small chunks of the comet will make it through the atmosphere, however, and John’s neighbors gather around the living-room TV to watch one piece land harmlessly in the Atlantic. Instead, it lands in Tampa, wipes out a good chunk of Florida, and suddenly, as they say, shit gets real. As someone who makes buildings, John discovers he’s been chosen — by some faceless, mechanical government bureaucracy — to be flown out with his family via secret military transport to an undisclosed bunker, where a small number of humans will shelter against what it now seems clear will be an extinction-level event. (You get one guess as to where this secret bunker turns out to be.)

That could be just one story line in any multicharacter disaster extravaganza (as a matter of fact, it’s not dissimilar to one story line in Emmerich’s 2012 ), but Greenland has more in common with Rod Serling than it does with Irwin Allen. When John’s neighbors find out that he’s been selected for survival and they haven’t, they implore him to take them with him, or at least take their kids. Director Waugh embraces and extends the drama without turning anyone into a convenient villain: These are just confused, scared people who don’t know what to do. That idea governs much of Greenland . This is not a Wouldn’t it be awesome if … movie; this is a Wouldn’t it totally suck if … movie.

But it’s also strangely optimistic. As the Garritys’ journey takes them across a wide swath of the country, the film presents us with a society that is simultaneously crumbling to pieces and, in certain corners, functioning surprisingly well. Strangers are kind when you least expect and most need them to be. (Some are less so; this is, after all, still a disaster movie.) Military bases, filled with soldiers who themselves haven’t been selected for survival, function with doomed, can-do efficiency. Everyone has a story, from a seemingly helpful couple on the highway, to a transportation coordinator at an airfield, to some random guys on a truck. A delightfully leathery Scott Glenn pops in as Allison’s father. Holt McCallany shows up, as he’s wont to do. Waugh and writer Chris Sparling seem to understand that narrative conveniences won’t feel like narrative conveniences if you bother to make them actual characters, a lesson not every Hollywood filmmaker learns.

Waugh is quickly becoming our most foremost auteur of Movies That Had No Business Being This Good. He somehow turned Angel Has Fallen , the third (and, I believe, the cheapest) entry in the Has Fallen series (also starring Butler), into something worth celebrating, and he can also lay claim to having given the Rock his best role, in the tense, moving trafficking drama Snitch . The director’s attention to ground-level detail serves him well in the action arena — with both things like fights (there’s a nice little truck throwdown in Greenland ) and ratcheting up tension. The first indications in this movie that something is amiss are a glimpse of a distant armada of jets in the sky and an automated phone call received in the middle of a supermarket run. That may not sound like much, but I kept thinking, This is how it would happen . As the Garritys continue on their increasingly desperate path, they try to maintain their composure around young Nathan, which any parent can relate to. Even the occasional TV and radio broadcasts, going from gee-whiz news stories to sensationalist exploitation to somber scientific pronouncements to fuzzy recorded messages, feel real. The whole damn thing feels real. Which is both a wonderful surprise and a hell of a betrayal for any of us who just wanted to see Gerard Butler fight a comet named Clarke.

More Movie Reviews

You’ve Seen This One Before
Who Needs Gods When You Have Ralph Fiennes?
Y2K Will Make You Nostalgic for a Funnier Comedy
movie review
gerard butler
ric roman waugh
disaster movies

What is your email?

This email will be used to sign into all New York sites. By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy and to receive email correspondence from us.

Sign In To Continue Reading

Create your free account.

Password must be at least 8 characters and contain:

Lower case letters (a-z)
Upper case letters (A-Z)
Numbers (0-9)
Special Characters (!@#$%^&*)

As part of your account, you’ll receive occasional updates and offers from New York , which you can opt out of anytime.

an image, when javascript is unavailable

By providing your information, you agree to our Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy . We use vendors that may also process your information to help provide our services. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA Enterprise and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

‘Greenland’ Review: Gerard Butler Stars in a Disaster Movie That’s Better than 2020 Deserves

David ehrlich.

Share on Facebook
Share to Flipboard
Share on LinkedIn
Show more sharing options
Submit to Reddit
Post to Tumblr
Print This Page
Share on WhatsApp

After the hellscape of a year that was 2020, it stands to reason that a disaster movie about a regular guy and his family trying to stay alive as the world goes to shit around them would feel redundant and/or too close to home. Either way, it seems like something that wouldn’t be worth paying for when you can get the real thing for free by looking at your window, turning on the TV, or — and this one is extra fun — just thinking about literally any single aspect of your life as it’s been since March.

And yet it’s precisely because Ric Roman Waugh’s mid-budget “ Greenland ” eschews Hollywood expectations of its “craggy man vs. a planet-destroying comet” premise and drills in on that human-sized helplessness we’ve all come to know so well that its most effective moments remind us why these movies ever resonated with people in the first place. The universe is a cold and indifferent place where inanimate objects will travel hundreds of thousands of lightyears across the stars just to kill you and everyone you love, but the pathetic smallness of our mortal existence — the silly lives we lead and the people we’re lucky enough to share them with — is precisely what makes them so precious. Maybe that sentiment is too facile to put into words, but it’s just facile enough to build a satisfyingly bone-stupid Gerard Butler vehicle around.

Butler stars as John Garrity, a Scottish-born structural engineer so ordinary that “everyman” feels a little too edgy a term to describe him. If his marriage to Allison (the ever-appealing Morena Baccarin ) were one of the skyscrapers he built, it might not be falling apart. We don’t learn the reason behind their recent separation until toward the end of the film, but it comes as a shock when we do; not because the reveal itself is surprising, but rather because “Greenland” is so light on character detail that you almost can’t believe that it doubles back to fill in that blank. All you really need to know about the Garritys is that the growing distance between them is still bridged by their mutual love for their diabetic seven-year-old son Nathan (Roger Floyd), whose regular need for insulin — to the great shock of anyone who’s never seen a movie before — will very much come up again. (Among other things, “Greenland” is a nail-biter for anyone who’s ever worried about how they’d fare without their respective crutches during an emergency.)

The other thing about Nathan is that he’s super-obsessed with the comet that’s speeding towards Earth. He talks about the interstellar object — dubbed “Clark” — so familiarly that it sounds like his best friend. Maybe it is, the poor kid. He loves Clark. Alas, Clark does not love him back. Clark zapped into Earth’s neighborhood from an unknown solar system in a way that caught NASA flat-footed (and might inspire you to wonder if something more sinister is afoot), and it has no intention of politely burning up in our atmosphere or sinking into the ocean as scientists predict that it will. Please forgive the polling error, but it turns out that Clark is composed of fragments big enough to kill millions of people with each strike, and one particularly hefty chunk — set to make landfall some 48 hours after first impact — will cause what “Deep Impact” fans know as an E.L.E., or extinction-level-event. There’s no stopping it. Robert Duvall is too old to go up there and nuke it from the inside out, and NASA spent too much on Space Force to afford Bruce Willis’ daily rate of one million dollars. The horrifying scene where the Garritys and their neighborhood friends gather around the TV and watch a piece of the comet decimate Tampa confirms what we already feared: Clark kind of sucks.

The only sliver of hope — the only thing that stops “Greenland” from essentially becoming a Barstool-friendly “Melancholia” remake — is the special alert that John gets on his phone. Due to his expertise as an engineer, he and his family have been selected to join other valuable people from around the world in an underground bunker where they might survive the devastation to come. And where is that bunker? Well, our lives would be a lot easier if we knew what the movie about us was called. But hitching a government-operated ride to Greenland won’t be as easy as it sounds, especially once panic sets in and the general public gets wind of the plan.

So begins a resourceful disaster movie that maintains its lock on the intimate anxieties that underwrite our collective fear of city-sized asteroids, underground volcanoes, and Cloverfield monsters — mostly because Waugh can’t afford to divert his attention to the destruction itself. Shot on a shoestring budget relative to the rest of its genre, “Greenland” is able to leverage a blood-red aurora borealis, a handful of fireballs, and a few distant glimpses of space rocks blazing a trail through the night sky into a convincing portrait of a planetary death rattle. Things grow a bit squidgy whenever Waugh goes in for the money shots, but his eyes are seldom bigger than his wallet in a film that mines little suspense from the Garritys’ far-fetched race to safety, and a lot from their scramble to reunite whenever they get separated.

If Waugh lacks the vision and/or resources to compete with something like Steven Spielberg’s “War of the Worlds,” the granular focus of Chris Sparling’s script encourages the director to seize on the moments that are too small for other, more spectacle-oriented disaster movies to accommodate. Show audiences an alien spaceship demolishing the White House and they might lose interest in the chain of command that’s involved in denying a diabetic child access to a military plane, but keep the action on the ground level and the life-or-death stakes of a desperate evacuation come to the fore.

That “Greenland” is able to keep things on a human level for almost the entire duration of its runtime is also made possible by the film’s quiet insistence on the kindness of strangers and the insidiousness that’s made possible by our own self-interest. En masse, the terrified hordes that John and his family encounter are as scary as the comet that’s whipped them into a frenzy, but most of them soften when faced with personal responsibility; the rest are forced into such immediate confrontation with the inhumanity of their actions that only the most desperate of the lot can see them through. One sequence involving Hope Davis and David Denman as a couple who offer Allison and Nathan help is particularly sickening for how it maps a Good Samaritan gone bad.

None of this stuff is rendered with the rigor or curiosity required to elevate “Greenland” too far above the Redbox expectations of its genre; the movie only gets dopier as it makes its way north, and some of the clumsier lines of dialogue underscore the moments in which the filmmakers’ lost faith in the story they were telling (upon learning that comet shards are heading for upstate New York, Allison turns to camera and asks “Isn’t that where we are!?”). But if none of the film’s main characters ever become more than stand-ins for the feelings they’re meant to evoke from us, the unflinching conviction with which “Greenland” commits to those feelings is enough to make it more harrowing than hokey, and more honest than it is far-fetched. At the end of a year full of awful surprises, a twist this inane almost qualifies as a legitimate silver lining: The creative team behind “ Angel Has Fallen ,” of all people, have inadvertently made only the second mainstream film of 2020 that captures what it felt like to live through it, and the first that doesn’t climax with Rudy Giuliani’s penis.

STX Films will release “Greenland” on VOD on Friday, December 18.

Metacritic reviews

83 The Film Stage Dan Mecca The Film Stage Dan Mecca At first glance, Ric Roman Waugh’s Greenland appears to be a spiritual sequel to Geostorm. Also starring Gerard Butler, that 2017 film is a silly, diverting disaster-action epic. Greenland is decidedly more nuanced, cerebral, and, frankly, memorable.
75 Chicago Sun-Times Richard Roeper Chicago Sun-Times Richard Roeper Unlike the typical, effects-laden, comet-threatens-the-planet B-movie, Greenland is more in the vein of Steven Spielberg’s “War of the Worlds,” with the scenes of chaos and destruction serving as the backdrop for the story of one family’s desperate quest for survival — even when circumstances have ripped them apart.
75 IndieWire David Ehrlich IndieWire David Ehrlich Things grow a bit squidgy whenever Waugh goes in for the money shots, but his eyes are seldom bigger than his wallet in a film that mines little suspense from the Garritys’ far-fetched race to safety, and a lot from their scramble to reunite whenever they get separated.
70 The Hollywood Reporter Jordan Mintzer The Hollywood Reporter Jordan Mintzer And yet, what makes Greenland stand out is how, at certain times, what we’re watching doesn’t seem so spectacular, but very much like the real thing — albeit with a fair amount of VFX and Butler’s own brand of sweaty, stress-bucket bravado.
63 Slant Magazine Derek Smith Slant Magazine Derek Smith There are enough left turns here to allow us to shake the impression that we’ve been to this rodeo before.
63 Chicago Tribune Katie Walsh Chicago Tribune Katie Walsh If we strip away the comets raining fire on the earth, this film is about how the ways in which how we treat each other can be a matter of life or death. Even in that darkness, it dares to have a little hope.
60 The Guardian Benjamin Lee The Guardian Benjamin Lee It’s an adequate, involving enough afternoon watch (faint praise: better than Geostorm) and for those with a certain destructive itch that still needs scratching, this should do the job.
60 TheWrap Alonso Duralde TheWrap Alonso Duralde For most of its running time, it has a palpable B-movie energy that gives a little oomph to the umpteenth cinematic portrayal of humanity’s end.
58 The Playlist Andrew Crump The Playlist Andrew Crump Greenland isn’t some self-insistently timely movie and it probably isn’t the movie we “need” right now. But it’s the movie we have, and its honest to goodness but unintended genre resonance makes it easy to embrace.
50 Variety Owen Gleiberman Variety Owen Gleiberman In its relatively small-scale, often rather plodding B-movie way, it wants to do for apocalypse thrillers what “Contagion” did for outbreak movies. And there are moments when it does.
See all 25 reviews on Metacritic.com
See all external reviews for Greenland

More from this title

More to explore, recently viewed.

Your browser is not supported

Sorry but it looks as if your browser is out of date. To get the best experience using our site we recommend that you upgrade or switch browsers.

Find a solution

Skip to main content
Skip to navigation

Back to parent navigation item
Digital Editions
Screen Network
The Screen Podcast
Stars Of Tomorrow
World of Locations
UK in focus
Job vacancies
Cannes Close-Up
Distribution
Staff moves
Artificial intelligence
Territories
UK & Ireland
North America
Asia Pacific
Middle East & Africa
Future Leaders
My Screen Life
Karlovy Vary
San Sebastian
Sheffield Doc/Fest
Box Office Reports
International
Golden Globes
European Film Awards
Stars of Tomorrow

Subscribe to Screen International

Monthly print editions
Awards season weeklies
Stars of Tomorrow and exclusive supplements
Over 16 years of archived content
More from navigation items

‘Greenland’: Review

By Tim Grierson, Senior US Critic 2020-12-17T11:51:00+00:00

An unassumingly effective apocalypse

Source: G-BASE

‘Greenland’

Dir: Ric Roman Waugh. US. 2020. 119mins.

Delivering the apocalypse on a budget, the disaster film Greenland dramatises the end of the world with no-nonsense efficiency. Gerard Butler’s sturdy performance is perfectly suited to the modest proceedings: Playing a husband and father trying to protect his family as a doomsday comet rockets toward Earth, the B-movie star exudes just the right amount of weathered weariness and rumpled vulnerability. Those hoping for the spectacle of a 2012 or the swagger of an Armageddon will be disappointed, but director Ric Roman Waugh gives the story a consistent tautness, which helps make up for the familiar trappings and occasionally convoluted plotting.

A muscular, barebones survival story that even makes room for some genuine emotion

Having already scampered around multiple international markets dodging lockdowns, Greenland arrives on VOD services in the UK and US starting December 18. Butler’s name will help boost awareness, as well as alert potential viewers that this is a straightforward, unpretentious thriller — although not as action-packed as his Fallen films.

Butler plays John Garrity, a structural engineer who is separated from his wife Allison (Morena Baccarin) and devoted to his young, diabetic son Nathan (Roger Dale Floyd). John holds out hope that a reconciliation with Allison might be possible, but soon a graver concern presents itself: a massive comet is on a collision course with the planet, with an extinction-level event anticipated in 48 hours.

To John’s surprise, he receives a text from Homeland Security, indicating that he and his family are among the few to be selected to be escorted to a top-secret base in Greenland. Unsure why he’s been chosen, he nonetheless hastily gets Allison and Nathan in the car as they drive off to the rendezvous spot before the human race is obliterated.

Waugh, who directed the 2019 Butler vehicle Angel Has Fallen , doesn’t spend a lot of time on the gaudy scenes of colossal devastation that disaster auteurs like Roland Emmerich would linger over. The reason, of course, is that Greenland ’s reported $35 million budget doesn’t allow for much showy carnage. (As is, the film’s effects can sometimes look rather cheap.) Instead, he and writer Chris Sparling put John and his family through one wringer after another, finding different ways to separate them and then bring them back together as they desperately seek safe passage to Greenland.

Refreshingly for this genre, the picture dispenses with flowery proclamations about the resilience of the human spirit. In their place is a grim pragmatism about how such a scenario would play out, with panic quickly setting in among the populace as widespread lawlessness takes hold. Adding to the tension is the fact that the Garrity clan ultimately aren’t able to take one of the planes that would fly them to Greenland — and as they try to find another means of transport, their government-issued wristband makes them a target wherever they go. It’s a golden ticket that everyone wants, leading to several tense set pieces and close-quarters fight scenes.

Greenland doesn’t require Butler to do much beyond project rugged, flawed nobility. As it turns out, the friction in John’s marriage is due to his infidelity, a decision he deeply regrets — but, predictably, John will prove his worthiness by protecting his wife and child during this harrowing odyssey. The dialogue can sometimes be hokey, but Butler radiates the calm authority of an ordinary man thrust into an extraordinary situation.

Portraying the resourceful Allison, Baccarin is particularly anguishing during one terrifying sequence in which her character is ripped apart from Nathan. Greenland is the kind of film that, once it’s introduced early on that the boy is diabetic, ensures his condition will quickly become a major plot point. But despite such cliched storytelling, the cast conveys the stakes so convincingly that it’s easy to be invested in their plight.

As armageddon draws nigh and the Garritys are reunited after a fraught period apart, it’s advisable not to think too long about the script’s nagging limitations — such as its insistence that this family needs to live, when so many millions of others won’t. And while the rationale behind the mystery of why John was selected by Homeland Security makes sense, the logistics regarding the American government’s plan beggars belief.

But rather than the overblown spectacle we’ve come to expect from films of this ilk, Greenland crafts a muscular, barebones survival story that even makes room for some genuine emotion. Hollywood disaster flicks have eradicated humanity many times before, but rarely as unassumingly as happens here.

Production companies: Thunder Road, Anton, G-Base

International sales: STX International

Producers: Basil Iwanyk, Sebastien Raybaud, Gerard Butler, Alan Siegel

Screenplay: Chris Sparling

Production design: Clay A. Griffith

Editing: Gabriel Fleming

Cinematography: Dana Gonzales

Music: David Buckley

Main cast: Gerard Butler, Morena Baccarin, David Denman, Hope Davis, Roger Dale Floyd, Andrew Bryon Bachelor, Merrin Dungey, Holt McCallany Scott Glenn

United States

How four documentaries in this season’s awards race used archive to bring history to life

2024-12-10T14:00:00Z By Wendy Mitchell

The teams behind Copa 71, Frida, Power and Soundtrack To A Coup D’Etat discuss their creative approaches to using footage.

How ‘Will & Harper’ explores friendship and trans identity

2024-12-10T10:30:00Z By Wendy Mitchell

Will Ferrell and Harper Steele take a soul-searching road trip across the US.

Ventana Sur venue Teatro Solis in Montevideo, Uruguay

Five talking points from Ventana Sur’s first edition in Uruguay

2024-12-10T02:23:00Z By Emilio Mayorga

More than 2,300 industry professionals participated in inaugural audiovisual event in Uruguay.

More from Reviews

‘Snow White’: Red Sea Review

2024-12-09T17:20:00Z By Allan Hunter

Sensitive, big-hearted Cairo-set drama looks set to be a breakout crowd-pleaser

‘The Lord Of The Rings: The War Of The Rohirrim’: Review

2024-12-09T17:00:00Z By Tim Grierson Senior US Critic

Animated LOTR spin-off places a fearless female protagonist in a lacklustre action-adventure

‘Saba’: Red Sea Review

2024-12-07T09:52:00Z By Allan Hunter

A Bangladeshi woman is torn between responsibility and desire in this sensitively-handled debut

Advertise with Screen
A - Z of Subjects
Connect with us on Facebook
Connect with us on Twitter
Connect with us on Linked in
Connect with us on YouTube
Connect with us on Instagram>

Screen International is the essential resource for the international film industry. Subscribe now for monthly editions, awards season weeklies, access to the Screen International archive and supplements including Stars of Tomorrow and World of Locations.

Screen Awards
Media Production & Technology Show
Terms and conditions
Privacy & Cookie Policy
Subscription FAQs

Site powered by Webvision Cloud

COMMENTS

Greenland - Rotten Tomatoes">Greenland - Rotten Tomatoes
John Garrity, his estranged wife and their young son embark on a perilous journey to find sanctuary as a planet-killing comet hurtles toward Earth. Amid terrifying accounts of cities getting...
Greenland movie review & film summary (2020) - Roger Ebert">Greenland movie review & film summary (2020) - Roger Ebert
Dec 18, 2020 · Those going into the new Gerard Butler disaster movie epic "Greenland" expecting a cartoonish romp along the lines of his previous foray into the genre, the mind-bogglingly idiotic " Geostorm," are likely to come away from it surprised. And in some cases, a bit annoyed.
Greenland - Movie Reviews - Rotten Tomatoes">Greenland - Movie Reviews - Rotten Tomatoes
Greenland presents the end of the world as we know it in a mighty fine and entertaining way. Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 12, 2022. A surprisingly grounded disaster movie featuring...
Greenland Reviews - Metacritic">Greenland Reviews - Metacritic
Dec 18, 2020 · Summary A family fights for survival as a planet-killing comet races to Earth. John Garrity (Gerard Butler), his estranged wife Allison (Morena Baccarin), and young son Nathan make a perilous journey to their only hope for sanctuary. Amid terrifying news accounts of cities around the world being leveled by the comet’s fragments, the Garrity’s ...
How Greenland Shows the Exact Way to Make a Good Disaster Film">How Greenland Shows the Exact Way to Make a Good Disaster Film
Jan 3, 2021 · Directed by Ric Roman Waugh, the film deals with the events leading to the appearance of Comet Clarke, a spectacular moment that appears harmless enough until several clues make it clear that something bigger is on the way.
Movie review: Greenland, Starring Gerard Butler, Who Rules - Vulture">Movie review: Greenland, Starring Gerard Butler, Who Rules -...
Dec 18, 2020 · Movie review: In Greenland, a disaster movie starring Gerard Butler and directed by Ric Roman Waugh, a massive comet headed for Earth causes mass havoc, and one family has to make their way to...
Greenland Review: Gerard Butler Tries to Outrun a Comet - IndieWire">Greenland Review: Gerard Butler Tries to Outrun a Comet - ...
Dec 16, 2020 · Shot on a shoestring budget relative to the rest of its genre, “Greenland” is able to leverage a blood-red aurora borealis, a handful of fireballs, and a few distant glimpses of space rocks...
Greenland (2020) - Metacritic reviews - IMDb">Greenland (2020) - Metacritic reviews - IMDb
Unlike the typical, effects-laden, comet-threatens-the-planet B-movie, Greenland is more in the vein of Steven Spielberg’s “War of the Worlds,” with the scenes of chaos and destruction serving as the backdrop for the story of one family’s desperate quest for survival — even when circumstances have ripped them apart.
Greenland movie review: a human spin on the end of the world">Greenland movie review: a human spin on the end of the world
Dec 27, 2020 · Greenland is just John and Allison and Nathan trying to get to that plane, and to any hope of a future. Human drama is centered here, kindnesses and cruelties and mixtures of both as desperation grips the entire planet.
Greenland’: Review | Reviews | Screen">‘Greenland’: Review | Reviews | Screen
Dec 17, 2020 · Delivering the apocalypse on a budget, the disaster film Greenland dramatises the end of the world with no-nonsense efficiency. Gerard Butler’s sturdy performance is perfectly suited to the ...