Samantha Travis 

Staff Writer

stravis1@umassd.edu

Calling all sci-fi, action junkies. Or anyone staying in on a Friday night looking for a movie that will keep you wondering from the beginning to the end. Ric Roman Waugh’s “Greenland” (2020) is a jarring, nail-biting movie about survival, global disasters, and humanity during desperate times. It may, ironically, not sound too unfamiliar, considering the year that all of us have been through. The movie runs for about 2 hours, so if you’re going to watch it, make sure it is when you have the time, because once you start watching, you will want to finish it from beginning to end. The movie received 79% from Rotten Tomatoes, and considering they do not hand out higher rates to everyone, I decided to give it a try and here is what I thought. 

The movie opens with structuralist engineer John Garrity (Gerard Butler), trying to work things out with his estranged wife, Allison (Morena Baccarin) for the sake of their seven-year-old-son, Nathan (Roger Dale Floyd). The whole world is excited because in several days, an interstellar comet, the closest one to ever come to Earth, will be visible from several parts of the world. People prepare for parties to watch the comet as it hits, reassured that it will burn out entering the atmosphere. However, it isn’t much longer until John gets an emergency government message on his phone, saying he and his family have been selected to seek shelter at an air base in Greenland. This is when the world finds out the interstellar comet, named Clarke, is soon to become fragments of meteor showers that will plummet Earth, the biggest one larger than the meteor that killed the dinosaurs, to land in just 48 hours.

The action in the movie becomes full swing, all hell breaking loose as people rush to the nearest air bases, prepared with aircrafts for the selected citizens to seek shelter in Greenland. The government has selected only essential or skilled workers, such as doctors, nurses, or engineers, like John and his family. Non-essential workers, or people with chronic illnesses, are turned away. Everything seems as if it will go fine for Garrity and his family, until the base learns his son is Type-1 diabetic and turns him away from getting on the aircraft. And once thousands break into the base, jet fuel leaks from the planes, causing a large explosion. This is when John gets separated from Allison and Nathan, the three of them going through hell and back to find one another again. So not only is it a race against time to save themselves from Clarke, but also to reunite again. 

While “Greenland,” has themes that many sci-fi/action movies do, they also have themes many people can relate to, such as love, family, and human instincts. “Greenland,” is not just for the sci-fi/action movie junkies, but also for people who just want a great story and to see the best in the characters they follow around for the whole movie.