In what would appear to be a universe without Bruce Willis, Ben Affleck, and Michael Bay (barring some plot twist) the Earth gets hit by a comet and just about everybody dies. That's the premise of Greenland, a new disaster film/thriller starring Gerard Butler, Morena Baccarin, and Scott Glenn, and directed by Angel Has Fallen's Ric Roman Waugh.
From what can be seen in the trailer (above), excitement of a just-supposed-to-be-flying-by solar system comet named Clark, turns to pants-shatting terror when fragments of said adorably named comet start busting apart and dropping on cities. At that point, Butler has to try and get his family to a safe haven because he hadn't been taking his doomsday prep seriously.
As stated in a synopsis of the film, the plot breaks down like so:
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 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 Garrity’s experience the best and worst in humanity. As the countdown to global apocalypse approaches zero, their incredible trek culminates in a desperate and last-minute flight to a possible safe haven.
On Wednesday, Butler and Waugh spoke to Entertainment Weekly about the upcoming film, which he says intrigued him due to its segue from family drama to doomsday thriller.
"If we talk about it at its basics, I just loved this idea of a family," he said. "It starts off with a feeling of an almost simple family drama: a family struggling to get back together, the husband has just moved back into the house, the son is not sure what is going on, and you feel like it's going one way but in the background something more sinister is developing. And then through their drama you're thrown into this much larger, epic, overpowering scenario that they have no control over, and it becomes this fight for survival, but with a family you're already grounded with and care about. It becomes this road trip to save themselves, and also what they experience along the way and how is the rest of humanity dealing with this. But ultimately, it feels like this journey into love and support and connections and understanding what really is important in life. And I felt like that was a very powerful and inspiring message."
The movie's currently scheduled for an August 14 release ("currently scheduled," of course, taking on a renewed meaning in the current year). At the very least it's a good trailer, check it out above.
