After it’s revealed that the comet that was supposed to pass by close to Earth’s atmosphere but not enter it, is in fact perhaps an extinction level threat, John Garrity (Gerard Butler), his wife Alison (Morena Baccarin), and their seven-year-old son Nathan (Roger Dale Floyd) embark on a perilous journey in search for shelter.

I love a good disaster film. In fact, I tend to love the not so good ones too. There’s something about the spectacle of them and imagining yourself in that situation and what you might do differently to the characters on screen. Greenland is one of the good disaster films. Perhaps I didn’t go into it with the highest expectations after Gerard Butler’s previous end-of-the-world-movie Geostorm which is bona fide fun nonsense, but Greenland really surprised me in how well it balanced the action and the characters.

There is spectacle in Greenland with John being sent flying by a shockwave or he and his family trying to avoid raining burning debris, and the effects are good, but the focus is on these three characters and what they’d do to survive and stay together. There’s news footage shown on TV of the carnage this comet is causing and bleak updates on the radio to give you and the characters a wider understanding of what’s going on in the world during this crisis, but having this family being the core of the film makes the threat more affecting.

There’s the big, standard disaster film stuff they have to deal with but there’s a lot of smaller, more personal stuff that’s even more tense and scary. Getting separated from one another, losing vital medication, it all helps round out each of the characters and get you invested in their fight for survival. The trip to a pharmacy in order to get medicine for Nathan is one of the most tenses sequences as you really start to see the collapse of society when people realise they have nothing to lose and only days to live.

Greenland really finds that balance for showing the good and evil in humanity. There are people who will stop to help someone just as they are committing a crime, there’s those who will do horrible things for selfish reasons, but there’s also people who are still kind and thoughtful in the face of such awfulness. People are complicated, and in an end of the world scenario when people are desperate, who knows how they could act.

There are a few clichés like how John and Alison are estranged at the start of the film and are attempting to give their marriage a second chance, so the fight for survival helps bring them closer again. The performances from Butler, Baccarin and Floyd make this family feel real – there’s one moment where Alison becomes desperate and emotional and Baccarin’s performance just encapsulates what a mother being pushed to the edge would be like.

Greenland is a really tense and gripping disaster movie that puts one family at the centre of it. If you’ve watched Greenland, or like the sound of it, I’d definitely recommend The Wave and its sequel The Quake – two Norwegian disaster films that focus in on a few characters and their relationships as they fight for survival. 4/5.