Gerard Butler has made his fair share of sequels, but few have held as much potential as Greenland 2: Migration. The original Greenland wasn’t even a traditional hit; it was released in theaters and on VOD at the end of 2020, when plenty of cinemas remained closed due to the Covid-19 pandemic, but it garnered some attention for being an unusually sober and thoughtful apocalypse movie, especially given that Butler previously starred in the likes of Geostorm. Because Greenland was about surviving a global apocalypse rather than averting one, any sequel would have to venture into the unknown with a drastically different status quo.
Greenland 2 obliges for a little while, though it also walks back some of the hope that ended the first film. The story rejoins engineer John Garrity (Gerard Butler), his administrator wife Allison (Morena Baccarin) and their now-teenage son Nathan (recast as Roman Griffin Davis) as residents of a Greenland bunker. They’re lucky to have been government-selected for entry when the Earth was rendered largely uninhabitable by comet fragments five years earlier; they’re also chafing at the loss of freedom, tough decisions and overall claustrophobia that comes with cohabitating underground with hundreds of others. (Curiously, none of them seem to have made many friends despite the close quarters.)
The survivors are still down there because it turns out that the clearing of air mentioned at the end of the first film is spottier than they thought. John repeatedly ventures outside the bunker, but only with proper gear and to forage for additional resources. He also frets about a restless Nathan putting himself at risk to explore the greater world. This conflict is mooted when a series of earthquakes destroy the bunker once and for all. A small group of survivors, including the Garrity family, therefore sets out to find a rumored crater that supposedly features a large pocket of breathable air, located somewhere in France. In this case, the grass is always greener on the other side of the English Channel.
This country-hopping mission lends Greenland 2 somewhat greater scope than its predecessor, even as it essentially recreates its central dynamic of John Garrity assembling a piecemeal, largely improvised path to potential safety for his family. This time, the environmental countdown clock is a little less firm – the worst of the comet’s fragments have long since smashed into the planet, but smaller fragments, radiation storms and the occasional tidal waves still abound at irregular intervals – while some added health issues try to make up for any diminished urgency.
Frequent Butler director Ric Roman Waugh – this is their fourth film together, and the first of two January movies Waugh has on deck, with a Jason Statham vehicle up next – keeps the action moving, if not always especially exciting. The most directly nerve-wracking set pieces are also some of the most ridiculous, as when the family traverses a dried-up English Channel only to find themselves at the mercy of a comically rickety series of barely-there bridges. The budget seams show when wide shots paint compelling scenes of a post-apocalyptic landscape, and then the close-ups mostly involve wobbly ladders or dimly lit exchanges of gunfire.
Moreover, though, this sequel doubles down on its predecessor’s earnestness, to the point of alternating between grimly offing side characters at random and then getting all maudlin about its own pitilessness. Fair enough that a post-apocalyptic story will be suffused with some sadness; the problem is, Waugh has a grasping, indelicate way with human drama that doesn’t do his star in any favors. Butler has relaxed into a dependably rumpled middle-aged presence, especially when he’s allowed to use his Scottish accent. But he veers toward good-dad bathos here.
He and Waugh seem desperate to turn this 98-minute adventure into a periodic funeral dirge, all while ignoring any realities that might uncomfortably echo our own world. Initially, Greenland 2 recalls and expands on the original’s accidental status as a Covid movie, with its masking gear and justified paranoia over the radiation sickness people might contract without it. Little comes of this, though, beyond using a radiation-detecting device to assure the characters that they don’t actually need the masks after a certain point in their journey. (No need to watch masked actors, of course, but that’s also the moment when it feels like the series abandons any sense of contemporary connection.) Greenland 2: Migration takes itself seriously in all the wrong ways; it wants to maintain a safe distance from the real world, while urging the audience to shed a tear over some imagined nobility.
Greenland 2: Migration is out in US cinemas on 9 January and in the UK and Australia soon
