Successfully blending grounded stakes with blockbuster spectacle, Greenland proves to be a compelling end-of-the-world spectacle that is as intense as it is heart-wrenching.

Cinema is chock full of end of the world stories, ranging from disaster movie (2012), alien invasion (War of the Worlds), nuclear war (The Day After), and even plague (Contagion). Greenland falls into that category of end of the world film that perhaps has the biggest payoff: the big ass comet movie. It’s a category which the likes of pop-culture institutes Armageddon and Deep Impact reside, yet Greenland has quickly found its place as the best of its kind yet.

Greenland focuses on the Garrity family, father John (Gerard Butler), mother Allison (Morena Baccarin), and their young son Nathan (Roger Dale Floyd). When a colossal comet named “Clarke” breaks apart in the Earth’s atmosphere and brings with it hell from above, John and his family are chosen for emergency sheltering. What follows is a harrowing journey through a world tearing itself apart, to an underground bunker in the island of Greenland.

Directed by Ric Roman Waugh (Angel Has Fallen), Greenland is a film that delivers plenty in the way of disaster movie spectacle without sacrificing its human element. The stakes at play here are as intimate as they are colossal, sometimes impressively so. While scenes of comet debris wiping out cities work effectively well, the strength of Greenland is in the ordeal this family endures by events manmade, as terror and paranoia grips a species facing extinction.

Screenwriter Chris Sparling (Buried) creates continuous obstacles for this family to overcome, ranging from bad cell phone coverage to intense violence. Of course some of it is ludicrous and plot holes aplenty are found, but there is no denying the emotion of it all. Greenland is heart-wrenching stuff that portrays the worst, and the best, that the human race can become.

Gerard Butler and Morena Baccarin are both terrific as the estranged couple who reforge their relationship through a journey of peril and destruction. Butler merges his action man bona fides with an everyday interpretation of a father and husband willing to risk it all for the safety of his family, while Baccarin is an emotional powerhouse that elevates a thinly written character into a memorable performance. Young Roger Dale Floyd holds his own as the sickly child who is often centre of dangerous scenarios, and drags our protagonists in different directions while on the path to salvation.

Scenes of big scale destruction give Greenland its disaster movie credibility, yet it is the human story that is the heart to an action sci-fi thriller with much depth to its core.