Review of Greenland (2020) by Whatiswrong — 18 Dec 2020

If you've been spoiled, over years, by an entertainment industry that aims to strip any substance of their movies, the plot, characters and their development, perspectives on our existence in extreme circumstances or any meaningful insight into the relationship of life and death, loss and pain, morals, freedom, love and salvation in the face of existential threats... then you might stand to watch this movie till the end. If you've not yet given up on cinema as an art form, we suggest you avoid going anywhere near this movie, much like this entire production avoided any substance that would even faintly move us in any way, in fact much less than that, it didn't even satisfy our already stripped down expactation of merely decent CGI and grand pictures. We're happy to go into detail on what bothered us the most. As that pertains to every single aspect of the movie, we'll just list them in order of how much they disappointed our hearts, insulted our minds and overall tortured our soul.

The plot is overall inconsistent, feels rushed and dumbed down, unrealistic and without any depth, rather the opposite, exaggerated and reductive and with it, reducing the characters and the entire dialogue down to a 10 year old's skillset of writing a (disaster) movie; leaving one to question with how many movies an industry can burry its claim to be an art form and stop putting money where it doesn't add any quality, but put up a facade any idiot can see through. I pray for our cast, as we would spirale into depression upon reading the script and try to build a character from nothing through merely method acting and emotions, which in the end failed miserably and left us unattached and almost in a continously cringy state. Any role next to our main cast (the family) was so shallow, that we could only laugh at the irony of them being killed or never seen again after a minute of being either of use for the plot or for a cheap shot at the darkness of human interaction in crisis.

Being rushed through a shallow, colourless story, leaving no room for any depth of character throughout the movie, there was no chance to feel for them. Paired with continous inconsistencies, you're left more annoyed by their hardship than anything else, as they added no quality to human development and of what it means to be human in the time of crisis. (SPOILER)They missed their only chance when Butler killed another man in self defense being left in awe, because the entire scene was so random, the fight started on such an insultingly dumb premis and dialogue and ended on a shot of the only useful side character being killed immediatly after giving Butler the most crucial information out of nowhere.

Pertaining to everything else: We are no experts. Our minimum requirement for a movie in general, is not feeling like our life's time was stolen, happy to feel even slightly entertained without having to give up on every standard.

We were shocked, reading the reviews of the so called critics. Even if each and every one of them were Gerard Butlers closest friends or better yet, family, we would still say you failed him, by being this dishonest about the movie. We cannot believe how low the bar has fallen even for movies of which we expect close to nothing.