He disaster cinema It hasn’t been very popular lately in Hollywood, and the failures of titles like ‘Geostorm’ or ‘Moonfall’ aren’t going to help much to change that. ‘Greenland: The Last Refuge’ fared much better, an entertaining film that opts for a more realistic approach and that has just landed in the Amazon Prime Video catalog in Spain.
The truth is that if we look only at the box office, ‘Greenland: The Last Refuge did not give money, since it had a worldwide income of 52 million dollars against a budget of 35 million, but it was not even released in theaters in the United States. That led to the video-on-demand market handed down its rulingand the result was an impressive success, with estimated benefits of between 60 and 80 million.
Humanity above destruction
This led to a more ambitious sequel being launched soon – it was said that it would have almost double the budget – and we’ll see if it ends up going ahead. However, what really interests us now is a first installment that it is true that in the narrative it makes use of certain commonplaces of this type of stories, but it does giving more importance to their characters and removing weight from the orgy of destruction to which this type of film has accustomed us. Be careful, there is something, and it works wonderfully.
This leads to ‘Greenland: The Last Refuge’ having a more human touch, something key to make it work much better than expected, especially when it pays the necessary toll of the first act and focuses on an impossible escape forward. The good work of its cast led by Gerard Butler also helps in that direction, but I also don’t want to forget the fluid rhythm that the director Ric Roman Waugh (‘Target: Washington DC’) prints to make its nearly two hours of footage fly by.
However, don’t expect ‘Greenland: The Last Refuge’ to offer a tremendously elaborate payload drama either, as it is, above all else, a hobby that uses any simple solution to keep things moving forward. The result is a much more realistic proposal than usual in disaster movies -beware, don’t expect the purely scientific to come to the fore either- that successfully combines spectacle, tension and emotion. More than enough to invest your time in it.
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