Greenland 2: Migration Is A Good Disaster Movie Ripped To Shreds

Short movies are a mercy, but every once in a while you get a Greenland 2: Migration, which plays like a more thoughtful and meditative piece had been snipped within an inch of its life. The follow-up to 2020’s Greenland — a surprising meteor apocalypse film, which flew under the radar at the height of the pandemic — Ric Roman Waugh’s unlikely sequel picks up after the end of the world as we know it, and delivers many of the same thrills and dilemmas, with a couple of heart-in-mouth sequences too. However, as the story of an intercontinental odyssey, it ends up far too condensed to be emotionally affecting.

In case you missed the original, the second entry (called Greenland Migration on screen, a title with accidental SEO prescience) gets you up to speed with some quick flashbacks, and one hilarious retcon. The first Greenland ended with the remnants of American society making their way to a military bunker in, well, Greenland, and a brief epilogue saw them opening their blast doors nine months later. Migration, however, opens with that same footage being played in reverse; the door closes this time, as voiceover from gruff Scottish-American protagonist John Garrity (Gerard Butler) explains that radiation storms and further asteroid fragments falling from the sky forced humanity back underground.

For Waugh (and for returning screenwriter Chris Sparling, who penned Migration with Mitchell LaFortune), the mere existence of a Greenland sequel feels like another shot at forcing their characters into harrowed situations as they search for glimmers of hope. How often do disaster movies get the chance to show you what happens next? Five years after the mass extinction event, John, his wife Alison (Morena Baccarin) and their now-teenage son Nathan (Roman Griffin Davis) are an integrated part of their sprawling subterranean society, fulfilling their respective roles as engineer, administrator, and mischievous student. They rarely, if ever, venture outside, but a band of nearby refugees sparks a debate about whether the bunker can spare room and resources. However, this ethical conundrum — while politically relevant — is cut suddenly short by a massive earthquake that forces the Garritys (and a handful of other survivors) onto a lifeboat bound for Europe, a perilous week-long journey practically reduced to a minutes-long montage.

There are moments when the film tries to stop and reflect on what its characters have experienced, between John’s near-admissions of trauma, and supporting characters who brutally perish, only for things to quickly move on. Their plan, once they arrive on European shores, is to head for a mythical promised land, where the world’s violent insurgencies and terrible disasters might magically cease (turning Migration into a film of religious proportions). But someone, somewhere along the way, seems to have decided that this destination is more important than the journey, or that the concept can matter at all without first establishing the emotional rigors and survival instincts that might yield catharsis when people finally reach the gates of paradise.

The film’s secondary characters — including a moving supporting part played by French actor William Abadie — all exist to perform limited plot functions, between getting the family from point A to B, or bestowing them with expository knowledge. The way the actors are dropped from ensemble for new ones to be picked up soon after becomes mechanical beyond a point, as though once-larger and more important roles had been chopped up in the edit. It certainly doesn’t help that the Garritys are, themselves, the same cardboard cutouts they were in the first film. However, what makes the sequel truly tick (much like its predecessor) is the way this family unit is just enough of a blank slate, and a stand in for some potential better future, amidst the doom-and-gloom of societal collapse.

Once again, Waugh’s moody vistas of group in motion, and of large-scale natural destruction, offer a tremendously visceral experience, if only in spurts. When storms and meteor fragments touch down, they do thunderously. A sequence of characters crossing a gorge, on rickety bridges made from ropes and ladders, is practically vertigo-inducing. Another, involving bullets tearing through a battlefield at night, speaks to the deftness with which the director crafts moments of intensity, as editor Eric Freidenberg cuts rapidly between terrifying wide shots and intimate drama. These great scenes are, however, isolated from the larger whole, as the film is practically pushed forward by the invisible hand of “plot efficiency” and studio suits proclaiming an arbitrary maximum runtime.

Is it speculative to assume the film’s biggest issues step from executive interference? Perhaps, but the result is all too familiar: a competent (and occasionally riveting) piece of Hollywood entertainment shaved down to its bare essentials. That Greenland 2: Migration works at all is a testament to Waugh’s skill as a craftsman of enormous action, and of post-apocalyptic mood. In a more just world, he’d be thought of in the same vein as Roland Emmerich (The Day After Tomorrow, 2012), so one can only hope that some future disaster entry lets him off the chain.

Greenland 2: Migration is playing in theaters now.