Greenland 2: Migration, 2026.
Directed by Ric Roman Waugh.
Starring Gerard Butler, Morena Baccarin, William Abadie, Roman Griffin Davis, Sophie Thompson, Amber Rose Revah, Tommie Earl Jenkins, Trond Fausa Aurvåg, Rachael Evelyn, Nathan Wiley, Peter Polycarpou, Alex Lanipekun, Gordon Alexander, Sidsel Siem Koch, Gianni Calchetti, Faraz M. Khan, Shayn Herndon, Leah Perkins, Antonio De Lima, Gina Gangar, and Beruce Khan.
SYNOPSIS:
The surviving Garrity family must leave the safety of the Greenland bunker and embark on a perilous journey across the decimated frozen wasteland of Europe to find a new home.
Set and released five years after the events in the original, director Ric Roman Waugh’s Greenland 2: Migration picks up with the characters (primarily the Garrity family, led by Gerard Butler’s protective John) in the eponymous underground bunker, a new normal that even they haven’t quite realized has become just that. A service engineer before Comet Clarke wiped out most of Earth, John finds himself in a similar position underground, performing various maintenance tasks while occasionally braving the radiation above (wearing a gas mask) to gather resources or rendezvous with survivors seeking shelter.
This leads to a scene early on with John’s therapist discussing that he hasn’t even begun to unpack the trauma of those previous events. With that in mind, this is a family-first disaster epic that, for all its full-throttle, action-packed ruined-earth globetrotting, is movingly about internal pain and what’s not said to put up a guarded, strong front. Working once again with screenwriter Chris Sparling (and this time alongside recent collaborator Mitchell LaFortune), Ric Roman Waugh and Gerard Butler evidently take pride in working in some human drama and genuine emotion regardless of what the project is, but here have outdone themselves in a journey centering hope for the future, mortality, and some self-awareness that all of this peril would do a number on anyone’s psyche.
It’s also a story of father-son parallels, as Nathan (now a teenager and played by Jojo Rabbit’s breakthrough performer Roman Griffin Davis), learning about the celestial system in underground classes and showing interest in girls, also expresses an interest in being as brave as his father, venturing to the surface to do whatever needs to be done even if it means risking significant chunks of life expectancy due to the radiation (which has affected the earth on a sliding scale of danger). Meanwhile, John’s wife, Allison (Morena Baccarin), works on a board that determines everything from ration distribution to how to approach situations that arise with new survivors to gathering scientific data on whether those radiation levels are subsiding.
Unsurprisingly (otherwise there wouldn’t be much of a movie worthy of blockbuster spectacle), the relative stability of this new normal only lasts for so long, and the Greenland bunker is no longer a sustainable sanctuary. This pushes the Garrity family (alongside various government personnel, scientists with theories on how to build a new world, and more) into an adventure across a wasteland where the English Channel is all dried up, factions have formed on the surface with fighting over resources and those infected with radiation, and full-on war zones shooting at each other for the right on what to do with the site of Clarke’s landing, which could hold the key to starting anew.
There are also several new characters introduced along the way, some of whom are dispatched so quickly that one constantly feels the urgency and danger of any situation. Bullets, chases, and general destruction are always only a millisecond away. Meanwhile, some of these new characters are used to demonstrate governmental failings for those still living on the surface or who enter the family dynamic, creating new emotional links. At only 97 minutes compared to the roughly 2-hour predecessor, there are certainly upsides to the relentlessly exciting pacing here. Still, one does wish the narrative would occasionally slow down to establish, let alone develop, some of them. This is also somewhat of a moot point considering Greenland 2: Migration is stuffed with visually impressive spectacle and an emotional core worthy of that chaos.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★
Robert Kojder
