GREENLAND 2: MIGRATION Review: Gerard Butler Leads Somber Entry in Post-Apocalyptic Series

Released at the tail end of 2020 as the global pandemic entered its second year, the Ric Roman Waugh-directed, Gerard Butler-starring Greenland, a modestly budgeted pre-apocalyptic disaster film, scratched a metaphorical itch most of us didn’t even know we had: Revisiting everyone’s worst nightmare, a cataclysmic, world-ending apocalypse, on a digital screen, though mostly from the comfort of our living rooms or computer monitors. 

 

With a production budget a fraction of a typical Hollywood blockbuster, Greenland sidestepped pricier genre tropes, instead leaning into the perspective of an American family -- construction engineer John Garrity (Butler), his wife Allison (Morena Baccarin), and their diabetic preteen son, Nathan (Roger Dale Floyd) -- as they dodged all manner of obstacles, including other survivors, as they made their way to Arctic Greenland and a U.S. government-owned underground bunker before a planet-killer, the Clarke Comet (aka, an extinction level event) destroyed almost all life on Earth.

 

The Garritys, of course, survived the apocalypse, emerging from an underground bunker in Greenland’s last moments to a new dawn and a radically new day, one where the loss of human life numbered in the billions, the air too toxic to breathe, and surviving outside the bunker all but impossible due to periodic radiation-soaked storms. All the Garritys and the other bunker survivors could do was wait and hope, the latter dwindling along their food rations and infrequent contact with the outside world. 

 

Five years on, and little of any significance has changed for the better. The Garritys still survive, if not thrive, underground. Now 15 and played by Roman Griffin Davis (JoJo Rabbit), Nathan wants more out of life than simply surviving another day in a crowded, sunless bunker. Changing circumstances outside the bunker, however, soon give Nathan his wish, but not in the way he wants or expects: Greenland’s surface roils with periodic earthquakes. Nearby, a newly active volcano spews hot ash, gas, and molten lava, threatening the long-term, not to mention the short-term, future of the survivors. 

 

Rumors of a lush, verdant sanctuary, a new Eden, circulate among the survivors, but it’s not until the bunker’s safety and security become fatally compromised that the Garritys, sporadically joined by other, usually short-lived survivors, venture back out into the world as environmental refugees (contemporary resonance alert), first across the Atlantic Ocean on a rickety boat to what remains of England, and later, on the European continent proper and a journey to the seemingly mythical sanctuary in the South of France where the Clarke Comet first made landfall.

 

Packed with obligatory, disaster-flavored obstacles, some human-made (scavengers/marauders, trigger-happy soldiers, bad drivers), some not, abrupt exits (the aforementioned fellow travelers), and the equally obligatory set pieces (multiple storms, earthquakes, perilous crossings), Greenland 2: Migration doesn’t stray far from what made the first entry an enjoyable time-waster five years ago. That it essentially reverses the first film’s journey (to Greenland five years ago, from Greenland now) won’t be lost on even the most casual of moviegoers, but at least this time out, they’re on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. 

 

With a budget nearly three times the original, Greenland 2: Migration's more expansive budget helps in delivering the ambitious scale and epic scope that Waugh (Kandahar, National Champions, Angel Has Fallen) and Butler obviously wanted for the sequel. Minus the questionably realized Edenic locale of the final moments, the visual effects take what worked before and expand it noticeably without feeling cheap, unconvincing, or derivative. A late-film sequence involving both a flimsy rope bridge and an even flimsier ladder bridge stays just on the right side of plausible, admirably delivering a palpable sense of dread, tension, and, ultimately, the heart-racing excitement that disaster-genre enthusiasts obviously crave. 

 

Played without even the slightest hint of tongue-in-cheek or referential humor, Greenland 2: Migration can feel dour or even downbeat at times. Then again, no one said surviving in a post-apocalyptic world would be fun, let alone provide anyone with content for a stand-up comedy special. It’s the somber, serious tone that lead and co-producer Butler obviously wanted here, though setting up his working-class character as a new, if smaller scaled, Moses glumly leading his family to the Promised Land might be, at least to some, a joke in and of itself.