Wait, what? Is this a Gerard Butler film or isn’t it?
Disasteroid flick Greenland – out in the US on 18 December online, and in the UK early in 2021 [UPDATE: 5 FEB] – is not, it turns out, your typical disaster film.
Read my 4-star review and article here
Director Ric Roman Waugh sees it as a monster movie as Clarke the comet goes from a beautiful once-in-a-lifetime planetary fly-by, to an extinction-level event. Also with the potential to be monstrous is humanity itself, and one of the themes of the movie is how people step up – or not – in times of massive crisis.
Gerard Butler plays structural engineer John Garrity, and Morena Baccarin his wife Allison, with Roger Dale Floyd as their 7 year old son Nathan. They’re trying to get to Greenland where nuclear bunkers await the most useful people in society for the rebuilding that will be necessary once Clarke has done his sizzling worst. It all sounds very traumatic, and I did start humming Get Here If You Can part-way through the clips and interviews.
And why Greenland? “Greenland – just symbolically – there’s such a freshness and hope. It feels like the last bastion of nature, of mankind,” says Butler.
Check out the interviews below, most of which came pre-sliced into easily digestible chunks. (I won’t lie, I love Gerry and cannot wait for the movie, but after listening to all of them in one go I may have momentarily hoped for the sweet peace of planetary obliteration myself.)
Greenland – Gerard Butler interview, part 1:
“How do you say goodbye to your neighbours… and I gotta now basically drive away and leave you to die.”
Greenland – Gerard Butler interview, part 2:
“I think it leaves him with a sense of survivor’s guilt… he’s not the only structural engineer on the planet…”
Greenland – Gerard Butler interview, part 3:
“Believe it or not I actually knew quite a bit about comets and asteroids… in terms of John Garrity, my character, he doesn’t know jackshit about comets.”
Greenland – Gerard Butler interview, part 4:
“All the artifice is stripped away and you go, ‘What are we really here for?'”
Greenland – Morena Baccarin interview, part 1:
“She’s very driven and very ambitious, she wanted to create the perfect family… and I think she painted herself into a corner.”
Greenland – Morena Baccarin interview, part 2:
“The mistakes are in the movie and it’s very human and very frantic.”
Greenland – Scott Glenn interview (Dale, Allison’s dad):
“I thought it was the best-written disaster movie I’d ever read.”
Greenland – Director Ric Roman Waugh interview:
“If you can only save 300,000 people, out of 330 million, who would you save? It wouldn’t be about the rich, it would be about skill sets.”
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FEATURETTE: Humanity
“It’s this family drama, but with this movie monster building in the background.” Gerard Butler
CLIP: “Where are you from?” Scotland. I mean Atlanta.
CLIP: The Barn
CLIP: “You know I will”