The Super-Rich Will Outlive Us All
By: John Devore
Tags: Cinema, Film, Movies, Masculinity, Men

Photo: Thunder Road/Anton/G-Base

The Super-Rich Will Outlive Us All

The new Gerard Butler disaster movie Greenland is not what I was expecting. Which is a good thing, I think. If Greenland had been what I was expecting I would have been pleasantly distracted. I thought it was going to be a movie about a manly man shooting missiles from an attack helicopter at deadly meteors falling down from the sky.

What I got was a movie about a man, who almost lost his family because he was selfish, almost losing his family again because the world is ending. There is action in Greenland, but it’s mostly a refreshingly bleak movie about human vulnerability.

The plot is simple: The government wasn’t exactly honest when about a killer asteroid careening towards Earth. It’s going to hit sooner, and completely destroy the world. It is up to estranged dad Gerard Butler to get his soon-to-be-ex-wife and diabetic son to Greenland from Georgia, where he’s learned there are bunkers that could protect them and a few thousand others.

I didn’t know I wanted a movie that was a little bit Michael Bay’s classic ‘90s man versus space rock bro opera Armageddon with The Purge, a fantastic b-movie franchise about society’s true, savage face and a pinch of Lars von Triers’ Melancholia. That last film, a sort of thinking man’s Armageddon, is a hypnotic gut-punch and Greenland doesn’t quite reach its heights but it tries.

Full disclosure: I am a reluctant fan of Butler, who is sort of the last of the strong, silent action hero types (with a sensitive side). I will watch any movie where he stars as a scowling, grunting, enchanted pile of meatballs hellbent on blowing shit up. I’ve liked Butler ever since I saw him play the title role in Joel Schumacher’s over-the-top film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s over-the-top musical Phantom Of The Opera. Gerard Butler can’t sing but that didn’t stop him. Nothing stops Gerard Butler.

So, yeah, I liked Greenland. It’s smart, but not too smart. It’s tense without being silly. The masculinity is tangy, at worst. I’ve seen better mass-destruction CGI but luckily the director knows the real spectacle here is watching Butler’s family, played by Morena Baccarin and Roger Dale Floyd, fight for each other.

Scott Glenn has a significant cameo as Butler’s grizzled no-BS father-in-law. Glenn is stoic and kindhearted and it’s always good to see him.

But that doesn’t mean my mind didn’t wander. I don’t want to spoil Greenland, but hundreds of millions of people — fathers and mothers and sons and daughters — are all obliterated by shockwaves and burned to a crisp by a global fire.

I also had a couple of questions, especially during scenes where a slowly collapsing government was struggling to rescue a few select humans in order to rebuild civilization.

First of all, in Greenland, Americans with specific skills are alerted via personalized messages broadcast on their phones and televisions that they have been chosen for evacuation to safety. Butler’s character is a structural engineer and he gets the call. (Butler is both a humble working dude AND brilliant.) There’s an awkward moment when Butler’s neighbors, gathered at his house, see the special alert on his TV and wonder why they aren’t getting any special messages. His neighbors are all nice but from that moment we know they’re all doomed to become charcoal briquettes.

Is that how that would work? Can the government just take over your TV? Who decides what skills are needed in the post-apocalypse? Do we really need to know how to build skyscrapers after the world has been reduced to rubble? What about bloggers? How many of those would we need after a planet-smasher struck? I volunteer, just in case.

We also learn that these federal end-of-the-world protocols ban people with pre-existing conditions, which meant Butler’s son can not come with him. This was the source of much nail-biting during the movie but, like, is that just bureaucracy? Are insurance companies in charge of national cataclysm policies? I know evacuations are urgent and all but we’re going to need families, right? If Butler is needed, he’s going to need his family? I don’t know.

I just hope the U.S.A. has a better “Holy Shit, Asteroid!” game plan than this movie suggests.

But here’s where I really started to daydream: There’s a version of Greenland about rich people. There’s an alternate doomsday movie to be made about billionaires boarding luxury submarines while masses of panicked nobodies desperately rush military jets on the runway en route to underground complexes.

This would be a somewhat more plausible story, actually. I just feel the super-rich are preparing to get through whatever apocalypse happens, be it a pandemic or a nuclear bomb, or some kind of massive natural disaster. They will survive. They’re like cockroaches with crowns.

I think it’s more realistic to imagine Elon Musk riding a rocket to a secret party satellite than an everyman saving his family from catastrophe. You can bet Peter Thiel has a hollowed-out mountain lair with wall-to-wall carpeting. The U.S. government’s bunkers won’t have free snacks. I’m sure regular will make it through the end times but the 1% will 100% endure.

In this alternate Greenland, Butler dies, and Jeff Bezos becomes lame-ass king of the scorched Earth. The super-rich will outlive us all.