I had been anticipating Greenland 2: Migration (or is it Greenland: Migration? The title sequence curiously drops the “2”) since the first trailers a few months ago. But gosh, a lot can happen in a few months. I’ll bet the filmmakers didn’t anticipate that Googling “Greenland” during the film’s opening week would result in a flurry of scary political headlines about the United States aggressively wanting to “take” the actual landmass, rather than surfacing catchy marketing for this rather forgettable dystopian sequel. Poor timing, for sure.
But I digress.
Anxiety about reality takes a backseat when the lights go down and we catch up with our hero, gruff John Garrity (gruff Gerard Butler), his beautiful, tough wife Allison (beautiful, tough Morena Baccarin), and their teenage son Nathan (teenager Roman Griffin Davis).
It’s been five years since the events of the first movie, and the family has been living in a vast underground bunker along with thousands of survivors in—yes—Greenland. The “extinction event” comet named Clarke smashed into the planet in the south of France, and the survivors have hesitantly begun exploring their immediate surroundings, encountering frightening and dangerous electrical storms and washed-up or abandoned relics of civilization. When the unstable planet opens a rift directly through the bunker, the ragtag survivors have to flee for their lives.
Conveniently, there are a few washed-up lifeboats on the beach. Conveniently, the Garritys scramble onto one. Conveniently, their lifeboat washes up right in downtown Liverpool after running out of gas mid-journey (Iceland is gone, btw). I mean, it’s all silly, really. But as the family and a handful of disposable others start encountering some of the remaining 25 percent of humanity that survived, I had a LOT of questions.
- In one of the first scenes, John talks to a psychiatrist in the bunker. I appreciated that they said they had saved more psychiatrists than surgeons, but that’s not what I was wondering: If the bunker had limited food, how did the psychiatrist have a big gut after five years?
- Similarly, how has everyone been surviving food-wise on the outside for five years if the planet looks mostly like a moonscape?
- Why do strangers give the Garritys their only transportation (not once, but twice) on their quest to get to Clarke’s crater (which is rumored to be a regenerative, Eden-like valley)?
- Why are long stretches of road basically empty, without vehicle carnage from people fleeing the impending destruction from the first movie?
- How has Nathan been managing his diabetes all this time?
Greenland 2 does have some thrilling sequences. There is a nice tsunami scene where you shake your head and mutter, “Sucks to be you…” to the poor folks on the beach. Another sequence harkens back to anxiety-inducing moments from just about every mountain-climbing thriller, as the family must first cross a rope bridge and then a precarious ladder spanning a gaping, earthquakey crevasse. Even the family’s foray into a war zone is intriguing (if undeveloped).
The first Greenland was a surprising and welcome return to classic, takes-itself-too-seriously disaster films. Alas, Greenland 2 feels more like a sequel for a sequel’s sake. There’s a lot here that could—and should—have been more fully developed. Instead, it plays like a rushed middle chapter that leaves too much unanswered.
