No Future: Greenland (Ric Roman Waugh, 2020)

I’ve watched literally hundreds of horror movies since starting this newsletter, and Greenland is the only movie I can recall that actually gave me nightmares. 

Greenland is a movie where Gerard Butler tries to escape a killer asteroid headed toward earth. Maybe you’ve heard of it, maybe not; I hadn’t, until a few weeks ago, and even then I avoided it, because watching Gerard Butler fight asteroids seemed like it would be mid. I am almost sure that you didn’t see Greenland in theaters, because of when it premiered: July 29, 2020. 

Greenland is a low-key, “realistic” disaster movie. It aims to do for this historically campy genre what the Battlestar Galactica reboot did for space opera and Game of Thrones did for high fantasy — bring it down to earth. You can do this kind of thing well or poorly. In the worst case, you’re just making the colors muddier and adding some sexual violence. In the best case, you reach into the heart of a profoundly unlikely story and make it feel real. 

I think Greenland belongs to the second camp, for the most part, but it turns out that making a giant extinction-level asteroid feel real is extremely stressful. It was probably much more stressful when you watched it during an actual disaster. So here we go, back to the summer of 2020, with a cast of thousands, including: 

• Gerard Butler! 
• Morena Baccarin!
• Bean Dad! 
• Panic attacks! 
• Sourdough starters! 
• Intense, ominous visits to the grocery store! 
• Scary phone alerts! 
• An old guy who I guess is not Lance Henriksen! 
• Staying inside for nine months! 
• Quibi! 
• The government casually killing disabled people! 
• Gal Gadot’s “Imagine!” 
• Cold, unfeeling bureaucracy! 
• Hope Davis! 
• Profound terror in crowded spaces! 
• Tiger King! 
• Nothing ever being or feeling normal ever again! 

The core of Greenland is traditional. Gerard Butler is married to Morena Baccarin, but their marriage is In Trouble(TM). They’re staying together for the sake of their adorable son, who is seven years old, and has diabetes. They live in the suburbs, with a bunch of other families, all of whom have their own adorable small children. 

One afternoon, in the middle of a party, Gerard Butler gets a phone alert: A series of asteroids are headed toward Earth. The final asteroid is expected to wipe out most life on the planet. Gerard Butler, his wife, and his child have been selected to travel to an underground bunker in the titular Greenland, where they will wait out the catastrophe. No-one left outside the bunkers when the doors close is going to survive. 

So far, so Deep Impact, but I told you, this happens in the middle of a party, and Gerard Butler is the only person present to receive an invitation. What this means is that we get to see a lot of loving parents of very small children realize that their kids are about to die. 

This is the Halloween Special: The time of year when I abruptly cut away, on an incredibly distressing sentence, to tell you that subscriptions are 20% off.

Also, if you like my work and want to support it, you can subscribe as a Friend of the Blog. A higher monthly rate, yes, but it comes with the knowledge that I can afford to build that asteroid bunker in the backyard.

Now, back to our series of distressing sentences.

I’ve written before, in this newsletter, about how I find it hard to watch movies where children are in danger. This is because, ever since my own child’s birth, I have been subject to a phenomenon I can only call Parent Brain. It’s hard to describe, without sounding essentialist — not all parents have Parent Brain, or not to the same extent; if they did, child abuse couldn’t happen — but in my experience, it feels like your survival instinct moves outside of your body, and comes to rest in your child. Your own death no longer matters, except insofar as you wouldn’t be around to protect the kid any longer. All that matters is ensuring their survival and safety, and that matters more than anything else. 

Parent Brain can be incredibly upsetting. Watching kids in danger, or watching parents separated from their children, feels physically painful, like someone taking your soul and twisting it out of joint. Greenland, the Gerard Butler asteroid movie, is essentially a machine built to activate Parent Brain. It mashes that red button over and over, putting children in some of the most agonizingly stressful situations you can imagine. 

Are you afraid of getting separated from your child in a crowd? That happens in Greenland! Are you up for some brutal kidnapping? Greenland has got you covered! What if the government sentenced your child to die? Greenland’s on it. What if all the cell phone networks went down, and you needed to find your kid, and you had absolutely no way of contacting them? Greenland portrays just such a scenario. What had to plead for your child’s life, what if you put everything you had into begging for someone to save your kid from certain and horrible death, and you were not successful? I don’t know if you’ve ever played that one out, mentally, but Greenland will play it out for you, as will your dreams after you’ve seen the film.  

Am I saying it’s a bad movie? No. Quite the opposite. If you really want to feel like an asteroid is about to hit earth and everyone is going to die, Greenland is just the ticket. The question is whether anybody actually wants to feel that way. In 2020, it hit too close to home for a lot of people. In 2024, for me at least, it still does.  

The disaster movie’s focus on the nuclear family is conservative. For one thing, it’s really a focus on dads — if mothers exist at all, in these movies, they mostly exist to cry and get saved from things. There’s a long stretch of Greenland where it seems like Morena Baccarin’s only narrative purpose is to fuck up and make every possible bad decision, while Gerard Butler squares his massive beef-laden jaw and bails her out time and again. I don’t love the politics of that. I don’t think that reducing the human species’ survival to a question of whether Strong Fathers can Man Up and Protect Their Children leads anywhere good. 

I try not to romanticize parenthood, or Dad-hood. Again, acting as if having kids gives you some special virtue or wisdom means ignoring the fact that a lot of parents — including some of mine — fuck up and hurt their kids. Maybe what I think of as Parent Brain is just a memory of  my own childhood, and my own vulnerability. Maybe it’s important to me to protect children because I know what it’s like to be an unprotected kid. 

Maybe. But I would be lying if I said that family didn’t matter to me; if there is a reason I’ve survived all my dark days and hours and years, it’s that I have a home, and a family to come back to. Our lives are small, and precarious; big tidal forces, like pandemics and elections, ripple through and around our stories and determine the course we take. It is very easy to feel insignificant, just one anonymous person out of nearly eight billion people, unless you have people you love, and who love you. 

That’s what family is: It’s a way to bring human scale to the cosmos. You don’t matter at all, compared to a star or an ocean or a volcano or an asteroid, but you have people around you who matter more than the world, who fill the universe up with just their small human lives. When I look at my child, I feel she is the purpose of history. Aeons and species and civilizations have come and gone, just to bring us all to the point where she could exist. 

It’s not remotely rational. Maybe, when you look at your own child or children, you feel the same way, and I hope you do. Disaster pushes us to consider the large scale, the very outside of what we can comprehend, just so that we can turn inward, to our people, and realize how short our time is and how fragile they are. 

So here is my point: If you agree that our time with our loved ones is precious, and that children are the promise of renewal given form, maybe wait until the U.S. election is over before watching Greenland. Maybe wait longer. It's a good movie, it's an interesting take on the genre, but making disaster feel real isn’t something you have to work on lately. Disaster is already real. It’s surrounding us. It’s the air we breathe. 

Greenland is streaming on Max, as are literally hundreds of less stressful movies.