Greenland Almost Had Me — Then Came the Tropes

I started watching the movie Greenland and overall it seemed decent enough. It wasn’t boring. The action moved at a solid pace and it had my attention early on. But as the movie progressed, it started falling into the same tired traps that almost every disaster film falls into, and that’s where it lost me.

Here’s a perfect example. One of the golden rules in any end of the world scenario is you do not split up. You keep your people together no matter what. So of course, the kid’s medicine gets dropped, the father says wait here while I go back for it, and just like that the family is separated. The second I saw that I knew exactly where the movie was going. Now we’re going to spend the next hour watching him search for his family because they decided to wander off from each other with a plane leaving in fifteen minutes. It just makes no sense.

When I see that in a film it genuinely frustrates me. I start yelling at the screen, I lose patience with the story, and at that point I’m no longer watching a movie. I’m just watching a checklist of bad decisions. I had to shut it off. I just couldn’t stay invested knowing the whole conflict was built on something that dumb.

I get that filmmakers need tension and they need ways to keep characters apart. But there are smarter ways to do it. When you lean on the obvious trope, especially one this overused, it takes the audience right out of the experience. Greenland had real potential in those early scenes and it’s a shame it went that route.