Greenland 2: Migration

Is there life after sheltering in place? That’s a pretty heady topic, intentional or not, for a sequel to a film that got released during the COVID-19 lockdown, but Greenland 2: Migration seems more interested in contemplating mankind’s destiny than in crafting coherent action sequences. Whether or not that was the intent of director Ric Roman Waugh (Greenland, Kandahar, Angel Has Fallen) is anyone’s guess.

Audiences have come to expect the slam and the bang from Gerard Butler international co-productions, but the big crowd scenes in Greenland 2 jerk around with shouty chaos. What’s surprising is that Waugh and his team shine in the quieter moments: a boat floating down the flooded and eerily quiet streets of Liverpool, with only the top stories of buildings poking out of the water; a frame-within-frame shot of a family walking away from an overturned van; a teenage daughter heartbreakingly bidding farewell to her parents for the last time.

Stitching those moments together is another apocalyptic road trip; in the first Greenland, comets are pelting Earth at extinction-event levels, while architect and structural engineer John Garrity (Butler), his estranged wife Allison (Morena Baccarin), and their young son are chosen to evacuate to a government-run shelter in you-know-where, spending most of the movie trying to get there. Now, five years have passed, and while John does what he can to hold the shelter together, the structure is weakening, the food supply is dwindling, and new refugees are seeking entry.

Another wave of comets takes out the whole base, and John and Allison and 15-year-old Nathan (now played by Roman Griffin Davis, Jojo Rabbit) are once again sent out into a dangerous world to find a place they can call home. Scientists are theorizing that there’s a crater in the south of France deep enough to sustain human life, but to get there, the Garrity family will need to sail to England, cross the Channel (which is now part desert, part deadly gorges), and make their way through a literal battle zone. On top of that, one character begins the movie with a pronounced cough, the kind that means they may or may not make it to their destination.

Giving us a protagonist that starts out a Camille and winds up a Moses is just one tip-off that screenwriters Mitchell LaFortune and Chris Sparling aren’t afraid of tropes, and so the fleeing family encounters one friendly character after another, including a Nigerian driver (Ken Nwosu) and an old friend (Sophie Thompson) who’s fortified a hospital so elderly patients never need to know what’s going on outside.

Greenland 2: Migration might have benefited from more human challenges — even teenage Nathan is pretty chill about the situation — but it instead turns nature itself into the antagonist, with even more comet remnants falling from the sky, radiation in the winds, and a white-knuckle sequence of traversing French canyons on a rickety rope bridge. Editor Colby Parker Jr. (Karate Kid: Legends) does his best work in those heart-in-the-throat moments, and in the aforementioned quiet sequences, but any scenes involving more than 10 or so people yelling or panicking or fleeing never quite come together, which is a problem for a movie about people traversing a post-apocalyptic landscape.

There’s a closing monologue about starting over that implies that the Greenland movies want to address, however obliquely, climate change and environmental disaster, even if the culprit in the films is a comet and not, say, oil companies. But their main contribution to cinema is giving Butler a human-sized character to play rather than the Secret Service superhero he portrayed in the Has Fallen franchise. Either way, Greenland 2: Migration supports a more thoughtful use of resources, and that’s a valuable New Year’s resolution for any January release to suggest.

Director: Ric Roman Waugh
Screenwriter: Mitchell Lafortune and Chris Sparling, based on characters created by Chris Sparling
Cast: Gerard Butler, Morena Baccarin, Roman Griffin Davis, Amber Rose Revah, Sophie Thompson, Trond Fausa Aurvåg, William Abadie
Producers: Basil Iwanyk, Erica Lee, Gerard Butler, Alan Siegel, Sebastien Raybaud, John Zois, Brendon Boyea, Ric Roman Waugh
Executive producers: Alex Ashworth, Courtney Brock, Samuel J. Brown, Alastair Burlingham, Pieter Engels, Noah Fogelson, Katie Geraghty, Daniel Kaslow, Louise Killin, Gary Raskin, Eric Sherman, Robert Simonds, Chris Sparling, Paul Weinberg, Brandt Wrightsman
Director of photography: Martin Ahlgren
Production design: Vincent Reynaud
Editing: Colby Parker Jr.
Music: David Buckley
Sound design: Dominic Gibbs, supervising sound editor
Production companies: Lionsgate, STX Films, Anton, Thunder Road, G-Base, CineMachine
In English and French
98 minutes