Greenland is a great movie. Not because it’s good, but because it transcends moral ugliness at the heart of this horrific story.
Gerhard Butler plays John Garrity, like almost every Butler role, a rude and daring guy with a good heart etc. Today, he’s back to live with his wife and son, after a drunken night with another woman and living away from home for a while. However, the neighborhood barbecue party to celebrate that afternoon was brazenly disrupted by a meteor that came to destroy all life on Earth without you being asked. Also barbecues in Central Florida.
And here’s the monster. The family receives an amber alert that they have been chosen to survive in secret underground lairs. The rest, they say, can suffocate. These bunkers are far away – see the title – and the rest of the movie consists of the hellish journey there. Although it must be said that everything is still going fairly smoothly in the midst of the apocalypse. Choosing who will live and who will die is never a problem. Because who decides such a thing? The government that happens to be in power during this ministerial term? Who decides who is valuable? Honest question: Would this option really exist in the event of a nuclear attack?
Making a movie about that family that managed to make it when hundreds of millions must die is in itself a kind of moral apocalypse. So I’ve already given up as filmmakers.
