A comet is coming for Earth (and Gerard Butler) in Greenland trailer

Saving presidents from terrorists was so last year! Gerard Butler is now preoccupied with saving his family from a comet.

The Angel Has Fallen star faces an out of this world enemy in the trailer for Greenland, the new disaster thriller from Angel director Ric Roman Waugh.

Excitement over the impending fly-by of a comet named Clark turns to fear and pandemonium when the fragments start laying waste to Earth. Hoping to avoid total extinction, John Garrity (Butler), his estranged wife Allison (Morena Baccarin), and their young son (Roger Dale Floyd) make a desperate attempt to seek refuge in a rumored safe haven.

EW debuted the first look at Greenland on Wednesday, chatting with Butler and Waugh about their latest collaboration.

"If we talk about it at its basics, I just loved this idea of a family," Butler says of the film. "It starts off with a feeling of an almost simple family drama: a family struggling to get back together, the husband has just moved back into the house, the son is not sure what is going on, and you feel like it's going one way but in the background something more sinister is developing. And then through their drama you're thrown into this much larger, epic, overpowering scenario that they have no control over, and it becomes this fight for survival, but with a family you're already grounded with and care about. It becomes this road trip to save themselves, and also what they experience along the way and how is the rest of humanity dealing with this. But ultimately, it feels like this journey into love and support and connections and understanding what really is important in life. And I felt like that was a very powerful and inspiring message.

Greenland opens in theaters on Aug. 14. Watch the trailer above.

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