Starring Gerard Butler, Morena Baccarin, Roger Dale Floyd, David Denman, Hope Davis, King Bach, Merrin Dungey, Holt McCallany and Scott Glenn

Directed by Ric Roman Waugh

John Garrity (Butler) is an Atlanta based structural engineer who is estranged from his wife Allison (Baccarin) and their diabetic son Nathan (Floyd). Doing their best to fix the marriage, Allison has John over for a comet watching party. Clarke, a colossal interstellar comet is passing near Earth. But when John receives an automated message ordering him and his family to report for mandatory evacuation it becomes clear Clarke is going to hit and humanity is days from extinction.

Butler may be the most interesting B-movie leading man who isn’t Jason Statham working in the west right now. His willingness to play mature characters and men with emotional complexity and difficulty, has changed the genre for the better for years (we don’t talk about London Has Fallen) and this is one of his best. Working with frequent collaborator Ric Roman Waugh and writer Chris Sparling, Butler anchors what you might expect to be a schlock fest with something approaching real sincerity and pleasingly little action movie sociopathy. One of the movie’s best scenes is an ugly, brutal fight John has no choice but to get into and whose outcome haunts him and us alike.

Greenland is full of beats like that. Merrin Dungey gets a single scene as a senior military official working the evacuation that’s haunting in its simplicity and power. David Denman and Hope Davis play what should be antagonists but do so with such raw honesty you understand their choices. King Bach’s Colin is a deeply good-hearted man at the end of the world whose loss is as cruel as anything else we see. Even Holt McCallany’s pilot, a man not even deserving a name in the script which seems cruel, feels like he’s wandered in from his own movie. The always fun Scott Glenn too, as Allison’s terrifying father. They all feel like real people, which means the loss of almost all of them is felt very keenly.

But the core of this is the Garrity family, and it’s so nice to see a movie like this asking its female lead to do something other than scream prettily. Baccarin is great, and her Allison makes a raft of smart choices in terrible circumstances. You see why she and John are together long before they do and their parallel journeys are really nicely written and played. Floyd is great too, playing an actual kid and one painfully aware of his situation.

None of these people are perfect and only the Garritys are lucky. That luck carries them across a surreally normal, fading America and out into the end of the world and what comes after it, all grounded in their relationships with other.

Verdict: Greenland is the first disaster movie in years that feels Rod Serling-esque in its humanity and it’s one of Butler’s career highlights. It’s even got a haunted alternate, with the original plan being Neill Blomkamp directing Chris Evans in the Butler role. I’d love to see that version but this one is much better than you might expect. 8/10

Alasdair Stuart