Greenland

Year 14, Day 101 - 4/11/22 - Movie #4,103

BEFORE: Gerard Butler carries over from "Geostorm", and this chain is sponsored by the letter "G".  Remember that from "Sesame Street", when we were kids?  The show would be "brought to you" by a couple of letters and a number, and that didn't seem weird at all, that a letter would be a major sponsor of a kids show?  Even at a young age, we were conditioned to expect that a soap brand or a toothpaste would be, through the power of advertising, be making our favorite game show or soap opera possible, and capitalism was already so ingrained that it didn't even seem weird to me, not until I was much older, that an episode of Sesame Street would be sponsored by the letter "M" or the number "6'. But for some reason, NOW it seems strange to me, like as an adult. Yet also a little bit cute and endearing, I suppose. 

I'm going to include this film here, because it's a film with Gerard Butler, and it plays on some of the same themes as yesterday's film, where weather meets global cataclysm, I'm guessing - but it's a shame that I can't use this one to link a couple time travel movies I've been trying to get to, it shares actors with both "Project Almanac" and "Synchronicity", and now if I want to get to those films, I'll have to find another way.  I made a little bit of progress on that topic last year - "Tenet", "Palm Springs", "Bill & Ted Face the Music", "Time Freak" and "My Future Boyfriend", and this year I followed up with "The Adam Project", but right now I don't see a way to work more films in, and there are a few to get to.

THE PLOT: A family struggles for survival in the face of a cataclysmic natural disaster. 

AFTER: OK, this film still counts as a recent release, so I'm issuing a planet-wide SPOILER ALERT tonight, if you don't want to know what the natural disaster is that's threatening all of civilization in this film, please STOP, turn around, go no further.  You can SORT of guess it from the poster, but before I confirm what it is that's got everybody so uptight, TURN BACK NOW. 

OK, still with me? You've either seen the film or you don't care, so yeah, it's a comet. Or, rather, a bunch of comets, with one REALLY big one at the end.  If you're deep into astronomy you know that a comet is different from an asteroid, they're both different from a meteorite, but really, at the end of the day, do you really care about the fine distinctions when any or all of them are capable of crashing into the Earth and ending life for us, like one did for the dinosaurs?  Oddly, there was something in the news TODAY about somebody finding shards of that asteroid at a fossil site in North Dakota, although scientists think that the crater that was formed is somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico.  (Today is also the anniversary of that asteroid crashing into Earth, exactly 65 million years ago. Don't believe me? OK, prove me wrong...)

However, this film didn't actually get released in the U.S. in December 2020 as planned, you guessed it, because of another disaster, the COVID-19 pandemic.  It did get released in some other countries, ones that opened up movie theaters early, but in the U.S. it went straight to digital release, and is now on HBO Max and AmazonPrime.  

Set in the near future (?), the film shows the collapse of American society, the chaos that ensues when the public learns that the comets are coming, and that most people will probably not survive. I mean, yeah, this make sense, you can't make a two-hour film about the crash itself, it's really the build-up to it, there's your storyline, all drama is conflict, so let's show the conflict.  At first the government announces that none of the comet fragments are even large enough to reach Earth, in fact, it should all burn up in the atmosphere, so get your friends together, look up in the sky and enjoy the show!  Then some citizens, but not all, start getting robocalls from the White House telling them to report to designated military air bases, for transport to shelters at a secret location. Yeah, this won't lead to people turning against each other, no sirree...

As we've proven over the last few years, we are a nation filled with conflict, and if there isn't some, we'll make some. What are we protesting/rebelling against?  As James Dean once said, "Well, what have you got?"  It started with the Boston Tea Party, continued with the Civil War, remember the Maine, women's suffrage, prohibition, Vietnam protests, civil rights marches, Kent State, right on up to Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, vaccination & mask protests, and the Capitol Insurrection.  (Yes, I realize I'm mixing a bunch of different political views and causes here, but work with me for a moment.). It makes perfect sense that the general U.S. populace would then find fault with the process of selecting certain citizens to be protected by the government, so once they realize the end is near, anyone not partying their ass off in their final days ends up looting, rioting, or protesting at the air bases.  

In the middle of all this, the recently re-connected couple of John and Allison Garrity, along with their son Nathan, get the robocall, and are told to report for transport to shelter. There's a ton of traffic, with people either driving to the airbase or just plain evacuating to random locations, but when they get close to the air base, they have to abandon their car, because the freeway's essentially a parking lot.  But they accidentally leave their son's insulin in the car, John goes back to get it, meanwhile Allison is told that their son can't be saved, because he has an illness.  Well, I guess this is one way to cure diabetes, just let the comet take care of those people - we won't have any kids with peanut allergies in the future this way, either. It's a solid plan. 

One thing leads to another, mistakes are made, the couple gets separated, and then can't reconnect.  Nobody gets on a plane, and the rest of the film is basically the family trying to connect after this separation, and heading for an agreed-upon meeting point.  At one point, their son is basically kidnapped by a couple who wants to use his ID bracelet to get themselves to safety, but they're unable to pull this scam off.  Again, this is America, where any government system that's put in place is immediately something that everyone tries to take advantage of. Remember those COVID PPP loans?  They're still trying to track down the money that was given out to people who didn't need it, who bought cars and boats with the money they were supposed to use to retain their employees. (Not my boss, I helped him get a loan to stay in business, and I made sure that the payroll paperwork was properly filed, so he didn't have to pay it back. 100% legit.)

Anyway, Allison manages to find their son, and they eventually meet up at her father's ranch in Kentucky, and they learn that her father doesn't want to be saved, he's led a long life and is fine with dying on his ranch, as God intended.  He's a tough old bird, but my money's still on the comet. Eventually the Garritys talk their way on to a private plane, and they make it to the not-so-secret location of the government shelter. (The title of the film is a giant clue, can you figure it out?). 

OK, here come the NITPICK POINTS, though I think not as many as I had for "Geostorm".  Clearly the government has had a plan in place for this for some time, because they built an underground shelter that could house a few thousand people for months, and that just doesn't happen overnight.  But why build one when they could just commandeer a site that's already made, like Fort Knox or Mammoth Cave?  Why start from scratch?  Also, who devised the selection process and programmed all the robocalls?  All of that takes time, but it seemed like it was ready to go.  

Here's the other problem - N.P. #2 - from what I know about Greenland, there isn't much "land" there, it's mostly ice, right?  I saw a map once that showed what Greenland would look like if all the ice melted, and it would just be a thin ring of islands, the rest is ice frozen on top of water, or so I've been told. So, umm, that's maybe not the best location for an underground bunker, if it's mostly ice and not bedrock.  Just saying.  

I think the bits about the selection process were spot on, though - Gerard Butler played a house-builder here (and that was a LOT more believable than him playing a weather satellite network inventor...) and think ahead just a bit, who are they going to need after the comet crashes?  They'll need people to rebuild society, so a house builder makes perfect sense, not a famous architect or skilled engineer, just a builder.  Though they probably needed to save a few engineers, too, along with teachers, scientists, IT guys, and people who know how to farm and cook.  Famous chefs, don't need 'em, but if you can bake bread or brew beer or work a grill at breakfast, good news, you can probably get on the list.  Authors, actors, guitarists, they're a dime a dozen, and maybe there's no need for them in the new society.  But we're going to need ham radio operators, truck drivers, and a whole bunch of mechanics.  It's something to think about, for sure. 

Another thing that this film got right was a proper sense of scale - meaning that when you see something very BIG, just because of its size, it's going to appear to be moving very slowly, even if that's not the case.  Think about the movie "King Kong", or any big monster movie - if Kong was depicted as moving at regular-sized ape speed, he wouldn't look right.  The early visual effects artists learned that if you slow a movie monster down, he tends to look enormous.  What bothered me about "Geostorm" was the depiction of very big things moving very quickly, then they didn't look real.  The buildings shown toppling over in Hong Kong were falling about as fast as small dominoes do, and that just looked unbelievable, and ridiculous.  Big spaceships in "Star Wars", like the Star Destroyers, when not moving in hyperspace, also move very slowly, and that gives a sense of scale, especially when compared with the fast-moving Millennium Falcon.  So the comet here, although we know it's probably moving at a fair clip, is shown making little progress in any one shot, because it's SO big, and also SO far away.  This heightens the suspense, too, of course, but in terms of outer space, size is all relative - planets move rather quickly, all things considered, but they're so enormous that they don't appear to be moving at all, especially when you're standing on one. 

But for the subject matter, I'm a bit torn on this one.  My first feelings while viewing it included thoughts like, "Don't I have ENOUGH stress in my life already?" and "Come ON, I watch movies to have a good time, not to watch the world get destroyed!"  But, as always, there's another way to look at things.  One reviewer praised this film, saying that you will probably stop worrying about COVID for two hours, while you watch this.  To each his own, I guess. 

Also starring Morena Baccarin (last seen in "Ode to Joy"), Roger Dale Floyd (last seen in "Doctor Sleep"), Scott Glenn (last seen in "Miss Firecracker"), David Denman (last seen in "Puzzle"), Hope Davis (last seen in "The Weather Man"), Andrew Bachelor (last seen in "Love, Weddings & Other Disasters"), Merrin Dungey (last seen in "Some Kind of Beautiful"), Gary Weeks (last seen in "Spider-Man: No Way Home"), Tracey Bonner (last seen in "Den of Thieves"), Claire Bronson (last seen in "A.C.O.D."), Madison Johnson (last seen in "Jumanji: The Next Level"), Holt McCallany (last seen in "Jack Reacher: Never Go Back"), Randal Gonzalez (last seen in "Green Book"), Scott Poythress, Mike Senior, Okea Eme-Akwari, Joshua MIkel (last seen in "Extraction"), James Logan, Randall Archer, Suehyla El-Attar Young (last seen in "Hillbilly Elegy"), Al Mitchell (last seen in "Just Mercy"), Marc Gowan, 

RATING: 5 out of 10 juice boxes