Fridge / Greenland

Fridge Brilliance

• As cruel as it seems to deny a child a chance to escape because he had Type I Diabetes, there likely wouldn't be facilities to manufacture insulin in Greenland, and he'll require regular shots that could deplete the shelter's stock of both the hormone and syringes. Even if his family gets him to safety, he has only a few years to live before he dies of his condition.
• Why did the government "select" entire families when they only needed certain professions and there was obviously limited space to begin with? Because most people would refuse to leave without their loved ones, especially if this was their only hope for survival.
• Of course the soldier would believe Nathan over the protests of Ralph and his wife that the couple had kidnapped him and wanted to be taken from them; in the middle of a crisis as chaotic as the one currently happening, the last thing a young child would want is to be separated from their parents.

Fridge Horror

• First, let's get the obvious out of the way: the entire movie is Fridge Horror incarnate. The world is ending, and there's no way to save it. All you can do is try to get your family to a safe space, which has limited seats and is being reinforced by the military so that stragglers don't get in. You're forced to leave behind friends, family members, even random strangers who you would never wish this fate upon if times weren't so desperate. Suddenly you're willing to fight, steal, even kill for the safety of your loved ones. And, of course, that's everyone's mindset, meaning you're fighting families exactly like yours who you know wouldn't hurt you unless they were desperate, because that's how it is with you. Talk about Personal Horror!
• The majority of people you meet in the film are likely dead by the end. The neighbors, the little neighbor kids, the partying 20-somethings, the looter who let Allison and Nathan go, the no-nonsense female soldier Allison talks to, Ralph and his wife, Allison's father, the people on the truck to Canada, the patient man who helps Allison find Nathan and the kindly nurse who gives her extra insulin...all annihilated when Clarke hits Earth.
  • The final impact and run to the bunkers was such a near-thing that many of the soldiers right outside helping everyone get underground might not have made it.
• Ed never got the call from John as promised. Can you imagine how scared and betrayed he must feel, waiting for the only chance he and his family have of salvation while the world falls apart around them?
  • To be fair, it's not like John could call him even if he wanted to. He had enough trouble reaching his wife—it's pretty unlikely any calls to Ed would go through.
    • There is also a risk on giving Ed any vital information (the existence of a non-military airport in Canada with planes going to a refuge in Thule, Greenland); because Ed may tell that to others [creating an avalanche of people fighting for a place in the planes... a place that did not existed in the movie (the extra weight of John & his family alone may have caused the plane to crash if the pilots were not so skilled and brave).
• All the pets that people and families had to leave behind...
  • Pets? Most land animals, domestic or otherwise, are likely extinct by the end of the film. Imagine a world with no dogs, cats, chickens, ducks, geese, turkeys, sheep, goats, cows, horses, deer, wolves, bears, or seals... Good thing some insects and songbirds seem to have survived, at the very least, no one knows about worms and snails, fish and frogs, only a few small rodents, squirrels and rabbits, doves and gulls, that's right, you name it.
• Can you imagine how bad the panic was in Western Europe when they learned that the big fragment was going to strike them? They had the shortest time to live since it would be hitting them directly.
• Depending on whether or not the planes destroyed during the riot at the air base were replaced, all those people who were on them who managed to escape ended up not making it to Greenland.
  • Or at least some of them may have. Since not all of the planes were destroyed, the remaining ones may have allowed some additional passengers. If weight was an issue, all they had to do was ditch some luggage and/or unnecessary cargo.
• John had to very reluctantly refuse to take Nathan's friend, Ellie, because she would have been turned away due to not being selected. Given that the family ended up not boarding the initial flight, she may have survived if they chose to take her anyway.
  • Not necessarily. There were many, many circumstances where a young girl like her would have very likely died. To name just a few:
    • Firstly, she obviously would have been turned away at the door. Given how desperate John and Allison were, they would have left her with the soldiers rather than stay with her, and after being faced with their own troubles when Nathan is rejected, there's no guarantee that the Garritys would come back for her.
    • If one of the Garritys did come back for her, she would either be with John or Allison. If she went with Allison, she could have easily died during the pharmacy looting or been considered dead weight when Ralph kidnaps Nathan. If she went with John, she could have just as easily been killed when the truck crashed.
    • If, miraculously, Ellie was still alive by then, her presence might have been the straw that broke the camel's back for the Canadian pilot, as a fourth person would tip the scales enough for him to vehemently reject them (or at the very least insist John and/or Allison stayed behind). There's even a chance Ellie's body weight would add just a little too much weight to the plane, causing it to fly too slowly and not make it to the airport in time.
• The ending isn't exactly the happy ending probably intended for the Garritys. Given the proximity of the large fragment impact, the blast wave, and the ruins of the airfield shown after the doors are opened, there's practically zero chance of a functioning airfield or port anywhere on the island. The rest of the world is too screwed up to be able to mount any kind of seafaring expedition and with the exception of Helsinki, too far away to be much help anyway. (And Helsinki is likely dealing with even worse damage.) This means that the Garritys along with maybe a few thousand survivors made it through the impact, which is nice, except now they're stuck on Greenland. Earth's biosphere has been severely damaged, and even though the movie is just ignoring the impact winter that would follow the collision, they have a few thousand people stuck on a now-barren island with limited resources and practically no realistic hope of help before things get dire.
  • There should be nuclear submarines that survived the shockwave [they would probably need those nine months to travel from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic by going through South America or Africa]. The main reason for those submarines to go all the way up north to Thule (Greenland) is for food/resources [in exchange they take people & bring them back to the continent, to other shelters closer to the Equator rebuilding cities (that no need all the people they can get)].
• The heartbreaking scene where John has to regrettably refuse to save Nathan's friend Ellie? The same scene was probably playing out with other families who were selected across the country. As it's implied that only immediate family members were eligible for selection, that means that people very likely had to leave behind extended family members (cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents, etc.). Also, since no one outside the family could be taken to the bunkers, that means that a lot of people likely also had to abandon their significant others.
  • The same can be said for the scene where the Garritys are disqualified for evacuation because of Nathan's diabetes. So many families likely had to be refused evacuation just because one of them either had a chronic illness or was disabled.
• Imagine the atmosphere in the bunkers after the big one hits. Everyone has lost pretty much everything and the only thing many of them have are just the clothes on their backs. Since it's safe to assume that everyone has lost more than one loved one, there were very likely more than a few suicides.
• The US government apparently has up-to-date records on everyone in the US, detailed enough to include current contact information and profession, for purposes of assessing who should be selected to survive a mass extermination event.
• The US government executes very elaborate apocalypse survival plans on almost no notice, suggesting they knew far in advance of the general population that the comet's arrival would not be benign.
• Supposedly 99% of the US military was not selected for survival. If 1% of the US military was selected for survival, and each selectee brought several dependents, then just those people would have amounted to tens of thousands of people - crammed first onto a handful of planes, and then into bunkers likely equipped only for small fraction of those people. So probably the US government is lying to its soldiers and hardly any of them have been selected for survival at all, except for the navy personnel who will likely ride out the disaster on their submarines.