Movie Review: Greenland
- Apr 20
- 3 min read
How the Greenland film series could help us to appreciate the planet we have been gifted with
By Alberto Sclaverano
Released in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the sci-fi disaster movie, directed by genre specialist Ric Roman Waugh (Angel Has Fallen, 2019), was a modest success. While it is not a movie explicitly related to climate change, it nevertheless offers a commentary on the beauty of our planet, a thing that many characters of the film really start to appreciate only when it is clear that everything will soon be lost.
Made by a relatively low (for this kind of production) 35 million budget, the movie starred Gerald Butler (300) as structural engineer John Garrity and Morena Baccarin (Deadpool) as his wife Allison. They live in Atlanta alongside their young son, Nathan, who has diabetes.
A comet, nicknamed “Clarke”, is approaching the Earth. All the simulations made by scientists predict that it will pass close to the planet, but it will not hit it.
Soon, a grim reality emerges. Fragments from Clarke large enough to cause an extinction-level world catastrophe start to fly from the sky, devastating Earth. The biggest one will soon land in Europe, producing consequences similar to the ones caused by the asteroid that killed dinosaurs.
John learned that he and his family have been enlisted in a special government survival program: they have around 48 hours to reach a super bunker in Greenland that will permit a small group of humans to survive and, perhaps one day, to emerge and repopulate a devastated Earth.
The film is structured like a thriller, in which the main characters must face many challenges in order to reach Greenland, navigating both the military bureaucracy and the madness of people who are seeing the world ending.
The scary scenes of destruction produced by the comet’s fragments, while present, are not the main focus of the movie. Greenland is more a meditation on the courage to fight for saving the people that we love, even in the most extreme external circumstances.
In 2026, Waugh made a sequel, Greenland 2: Migration, with the same cast but a much larger budget. It continues the story of the Garrity family. The planet has become radioactive, and it is frequently affected by extreme storms. The bunker in Greenland is devastated by an earthquake, and the survivors need to start a migration to Europe.
The crater of the fragment impact has developed a microclimate in which plants develop, and the air is breathable. But the “migration” is made difficult not only by the harshness of the environment, but also due to the level of chaos and violence in which the few survivors in Europe have descended.
More than its predecessor, the film showcases the consequences of an exciton-level impact on Earth. The planet, with the exclusion of the area inside the crater, has been reduced to an arid land; most of the plants and animals are gone, and the daily life of the survivors reminds us of what we see in the worst war theaters around the world.
If we consider the two movies together, what emerges is a powerful metaphor on the vulnerability of the beautiful things that we have been gifted on this planet. Earth is fragile, we live in a special place, and we should be thankful for it and act to protect the ecosystem, not to pollute and exploit it as it is happening due to climate change.
By showing what could happen in the worst scenario, Greenland and its sequel (both of which end on a hopeful note) invite us to be more conscious and responsible and to take care of nature and the environment.
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