Greenland is as much a love story as an epic spectacle of impending disaster

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The Earth is facing an extinction-level event from an interstellar comet as a man and his family race against time to find safe haven in Greenland, a new disaster thriller starring Gerard Butler (300, Angel Has Fallen) and directed by Ric Roman Waugh (Snitch, Angel Has Fallen).

(Some spoilers below, but no major reveals.)

Per the official premise:

A family fights for survival as a planet-killing comet races to Earth. John Garrity (Gerard Butler), his estranged wife Allison (Morena Baccarin), and young son, Nathan (Roger Dale Floyd), make a perilous journey to their only hope for sanctuary. Amid terrifying news accounts of cities around the world being leveled by the comet’s fragments, the Garritys experience the best and worst in humanity while they battle the increasing panic and lawlessness surrounding them. As the countdown to global apocalypse approaches zero, their incredible trek culminates in a desperate and last-minute flight to a possible safe haven.

The comet in question has been dubbed Clarke, and initially everyone is assured that Earth will not be much affected as Clarke swoops by, other than providing a spectacular light show as fragments in the comet’s tail burn up in Earth’s atmosphere. When a fragment the size of a football field instead levels Florida during a neighborhood watch party, panic ensues. The Garritys are the only family on their block to receive notification that they’ve been selected for transport to an underground military bunker for safety—mostly because John is a structural engineer with skills that will be needed to rebuild after the devastation. And there will be devastation: one of the fragments is nine miles wide, large enough to trigger an extinction-level event. Translation: the Garritys’ neighbors are screwed. They don’t take it well.

What comes next is a white-knuckle road adventure as the family becomes separated right before takeoff and must figure out how to regroup at the home of Allison’s father, Dale (Scott Glenn). Like all the best disaster movies, Greenland is about so much more than the epic spectacle of an extinction-level event. Ars recently sat down with Waugh to talk about how he successfully merged a disaster thriller with an intimate family drama as well as the film’s current relevance.

Ars Technica: One of the most interesting aspects of the film is the exploration of human behavior—and not just the expected widespread panic and mass hysteria. Different people react in very different ways. Otherwise good people make bad decisions, and sometimes bad people make good decisions. We’re seeing some of that complicated human behavior play out during the current pandemic.

Ric Roman Waugh: I remember reading the script for the first time pre-COVID. What I loved about the material is that it wasn’t really a disaster film. It was a love story about humanity, exploring how we would react to each other when something hits like this. Then suddenly COVID comes around and you’re seeing it firsthand. It was such a surreal experience.

When I went back to watch the movie, at first, I was like, God, who’s going to want to watch a disaster movie in the middle of a disaster? But this is a love story. It’s a story about hope. A lot of heinous things are going to happen during tragic events like this, but there’s also going to be a lot of good. I’ve always loved the metaphor of what the Garrity family stands for: a husband and wife that are so far apart, they’re on the brink of divorce, and yet trying to give it one last shot. Many sins have happened in the marriage that they’re trying to atone for and find their way. I thought that was really about what society is right now, of how divisive we are and how miles apart we are from one another. Yet when a life-or-death event happens, sometimes it has a way of knocking the rest away.

Ars Technica: You’re also grappling with moral and ethical questions, like who gets selected to be transported to the underground bunkers. There’s a terrible scene where the Garritys’ neighbor is begging them to take her daughter with them to save her. You can understand why these difficult decisions must be made and yet it’s still horrific.

Waugh: The moment when we knew that this movie could touch people, is when we shot in a real neighborhood in Marietta, Georgia, in a real cul-de-sac, with real families. We took over a house, and they were very gracious to us. I don’t think any of them really saw a movie being made before. About day three in the first week was when we had to shoot that horrible scene. I usually shoot these types of scenes in one long take. When I was done with the first take, my first AD put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Look up the street.” All of the real neighbors had been watching, and they were all in tears, crying.

If you could only save so many people, how would you go about it without creating mass hysteria? If you could only save a fraction to try to rebuild the earth in a catastrophic event, who would you save and why would you save them? That fascinated me, because you’re in this no-win situation where you can’t save everybody.

Ars Technica: This is a fictional Hollywood film, but you seem to have gone out of your way to make the science behind the basic premise reasonably plausible.

Waugh: You have to go in knowing you’re not making a documentary; that’s a different narrative. We wanted to make ourselves feel as grounded as possible, yet still allow creative license. First, how did the extinction event [that killed the dinosaurs] take place? Everything’s a theory because nobody was alive back then, but there’s a lot of data, and if you start cross-referencing, you get a really good imprint of what scientists think. The other part was the comet. One of our great discoveries was learning how a lot of near-Earth objects like asteroids or comets will break apart as they hit other kinds of debris in outer space, so that you end up with these fragments.

It gave me creative license and a construct, not to just have a movie that relies on the big one at the end, but actually have the monster constantly attacking all the way throughout the movie. It allowed the engine of the movie to be different, where I can have fragments hitting constantly. And it wasn’t just one monster. It was the monster in the sky, but it was also humanity. Would we become the monster and turn on one another, or would we help each other?

Ars Technica: That ties in to another aspect I appreciated about this film: the way you kept upping the emotional stakes. There’s so much more to this story than just trying to outrun an extinction event.

Waugh: Gerard Butler and I really wanted this to be about a man and a woman trying to win their love back by going on this journey, as they seek shelter and end up getting separated, etc. Each one goes through tremendous hardships to the point of hitting rock bottom. I think it was my way of saying, “Hey, you know what? Sometimes we do have to hit rock bottom to understand how to dig ourselves out and to rebuild.” And I wanted that to carry forward. It really is this 60-minute gauntlet run to get to Grandpa’s (Scott Glenn) house. And then the movie changes and becomes about rooting for this unit to survive the monster in the sky.

Ars Technica: Were there any particular highlights for you during filming?

Waugh: I’m a big supporter of the veteran community, and I’m constantly hiring as many military veterans in front of the camera and behind the camera as I can. The US Air Force was involved with the making of Greenland. We shot at Warner Robins Air Force Base in Georgia. I’m very proud that 90 percent of the men and women that you see in uniform in the movie are active duty enlisted and had never been on camera before. A lot of the people playing the civilians in the crowds and so forth are their families. It was really rewarding to have them all be a part of this.

Greenland debuts today on VOD and will be coming to HBO Max and Amazon Prime.

Listing image by STX Films

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