WARNING: Major spoilers for the movie Greenland (2020) ahead. Please move away if you have a problem with knowing how the movie ends.

I recently saw the movie Greenland with Gerard Butler.

It is a typical Hollywood movie with action, drama and a lot of special effects. A nice movie overall, given of course the category it is in. It will surely give you a good two hours of pop-corn-eating pleasure.

The plot?

A comet is approaching Earth and all is going to die.

All?

Of course not.

The hero will be saved. And his family too. And to be fair to the movie, the scenario is not the typical scenario of planet-destruction movies where the hero tries to save the world. Here there are pleasant twists from the very beginning of the movie that offer something refreshing and different from what we would expect: The hero knows from the very beginning of the movie that the comet will hit Earth and he also learns that he and his family are selected to be saved. These things are clarified in the first ten minutes of the film! This offers some real excitement and anticipation for a really interesting climax.

And the film does not disappoint us.

Yes, the hero is chosen for survival.

But things get complicated.

SECOND WARNING: Major spoilers for the movie Greenland (2020) ahead. Consider yourself warned.

Because the hero’s son is ill, he cannot board the plane that will take him and his family to safety. Where is that? Well, as in all typical super-effects-super-action movies, the shelter is a super classified shelter built by the government is a remote place. From the title of the movie, it is evident where that place is…

Fast-forward many minutes ahead and the hero at the end manages to reach the super-classified shelter (which for obvious-only-to-the-script-writer reasons is now known to everyone who can fly a small plane) right before the larger piece of the comet hits Earth.

This is a piece that will cause a planetary-anihiliation event similar to the one that made the dinosaurs gracefully give their place to us on this planet.

The final moment is touching and emotional (well, at least for the standards of such a movie – but to be honest it wasn’t that bad). The hero says to his son right before the comet hits Earth that he and his wife loves him and that it doesn’t matter what will happen because they are all together.

Comet hits Earth.

His (the hero’s) life passes in front of his eyes (something his son told him in the beginning of the movie that happens when you die, a nice touch of προοικονομία in the movie). Past happy days with his wife. Some past birthday of his son when he was three. Smiles and happy faces. A scene where he is hugging his wife.

And then.

Darkness.

I was amazed. Did I just see a movie where the hero and his family die? That would be fantastic! A movie where at last the end is not some corny cheesy ending of ‘happily ever after’. After all, it was a killer comet. Who would survive that? It all made sense in a poetic way. They tried so much to survive, only to die together. Isn’t that what life is about? We all struggle to live more. But at the end we all know that we will die.

Very few people realize that. I mean REALLY realize it.

We live every day with the illusion that we will live for ever.

We know we won’t.

But this is our secret desire. And we can’t let go of it.

And our civilization is too much blinded by our wishes that has banned death from our thoughts and lives. We know people die, but we only really think about it when people die. And only for a second, right before we storm out and try to conquer life, conquer the world and all that other nice life mottos we are meant to follow. Because life is all that matters. Death is for the others. It is not there, unless it really touches us.

And do you know what’s funny?

A death-averting civilization like our own is a civilization that at the end praises death!

One can never be alive unless we embrace our ending.

But we never do.

Even in the face of certain death, we always have hope that we will get better. That medicine will save us. That somehow our modern civilization will defeat death. And when it doesn’t, hope is just kept alive through the others who are kept alive. For we believe that life is about living. But it is not. We are alive because we have soul. We are alive because we are Beings. Part of One. If we were simple sets of electrons and protons then we would just be… simple sets of electrons and protons. But we are more than that. There is something mystical transcending through the cosmos. And we will miss it every time we focus on the surface of the passing river…

As Rainer Maria Rilke used to say.

The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.

But we like so much the small things…

PS. Of course after a moment of false astonishment, the movie went on. The hero and his family survived. Everyone in the shelter survived. Other people in other cities also survived. We are too important to be destroyed by a comet. Our civilization will survive. This is our dream. Fed by our dream for us surviving. As I said above, we dream of conquering death. And in the process, we forgot that life is not about living…

PS2. Now you know. Just ‘cut’ the movie at the end of the scene where Gerard Butler remembers his life. And the movie will get so much better.