Thoughtful disaster movie ‘Greenland’ is a welcome surprise

You’d be forgiven for assuming that any movie which sees action movie stalwart Gerard Butler reuniting with “Angel Has Fallen” director Ric Roman Waugh would be a heady mix of CGI-heavy spectacle and bombastic set pieces in which Butler (probably singlehandedly) triumphs over the laws of physics and probability alike.

But “Greenland” — which had its theatrical release curtailed by the pandemic and now launches internationally on Amazon Prime Video — is an altogether more sophisticated beast. So while there are some impressive visuals (ones that, sadly, would have been all the more enjoyable on a big screen), the movie is surprisingly nuanced and character driven.

Butler plays John Garrity, a structural engineer trying to patch up his broken marriage with his wife Allison (Morena Baccarin) and care for their son, Nathan (Roger Dale Floyd). When a comet, expected to pass close to Earth in a spectacular cosmic display, begins raining down on the planet and wiping out vast swathes of the population, John and his family are selected for extraction to a vast underground bunker network — if they can get there in time.

For all the grandstanding potential for virtual city destruction such a storyline offers, Waugh chooses instead to focus on the family — “Greenland” is no “Geostorm” or “2012.” And what’s even more interesting is that Butler isn’t playing Super Dad this time around. As we learn later in the movie (during an all-too brief appearance by Scott Glen as Allison’s father), John is far from blameless for the breakup of his marriage. By following one family through a global catastrophe, and by making that family decidedly fallible, Waugh has achieved that rarest of things — an action movie with a brain. Admittedly, the behavior of some of the supporting characters (during society’s depressingly rapid descent into looting and pillaging) feels a little trite and cliched, but when “Greenland” sticks with its central trio, it’s a surprisingly thoughtful outing.