10 Recent Movies NOBODY Expected To Be This Good
8. Greenland
You can't really blame anyone for having low expectations where Gerard Butler's new disaster film Greenland is concerned.
Coming off the back of Butler's risible sci-fi dud Geostorm, complete with a marketing campaign which suggested it was just another dumb, CGI-slathered disaster flick, there was no reason to expect much good from it.
But in one of the most surprising results of the last 12 months, Greenland turned out to be an admirably character-driven, genuinely well-crafted movie.
Butler and Morena Baccarin give rock solid performance as a couple desperately trying to get themselves and their son to safety as a planet-annihilating comet heads towards Earth.
Director Ric Roman Waugh makes the left-field decision to downplay the endless destruction porn in favour of more grounded drama which emphasises the mayhem of an everyone-for-themselves apocalyptic scenario.
It wasn't perfect by any means, but considering that many were bracing for it to be panned into the ground by critics, for it to end up Certified Fresh is an incredible result.
Better yet, Greenland was also an unexpected smash hit on VOD, causing STXfilms to greenlight a sequel, Greenland: Migration, with a budget almost double that of the original. Nice.