My quick rating – 5.3/10. I was glad that Greenland 2: Migration picks up right where the first film’s end-of-the-world anxiety left off, opening with a quick recap of the comet catastrophe before dropping us into a radiation-decayed version of Earth that looks about as welcoming as a frozen landfill. The Garrity family is back, still alive, still stressed, and still making big decisions under impossible circumstances. Gerard Butler and Morena Baccarin return as John and Allison Garrity, and Ric Roman Waugh is once again in the director’s chair, clearly committed to keeping this world as bleak and unforgiving as possible.
This time around, the hook is movement. After surviving in the bunker for five years, the Garritys are forced to venture out due to Mother Nature giving everyone a big reminder that she’s still in charge. John’s health is failing him, and since he knows he’s not going to last much longer, he becomes dead set on getting his family to the supposed safe zone near the crater. Why the crater would suddenly turn into some sort of Garden of Eden instead of being a smoldering hole filled with lava is quite a stretch, but you’re just supposed to go with it and move forward with the story, much like the characters do.
Visually, the film does a solid job selling a dead, frozen Europe. The environments are grim, empty, and convincingly miserable, which helps maintain that constant survival-movie tension. Unfortunately, the storytelling doesn’t always keep up. A rushed encounter in northern France introduces Denis (William Abadie) and his daughter Camille (Nelia Valery), who are quickly folded into the Garrity family’s journey like they were old friends bumping into each other at a local sports bar. Before you know it, they’re trekking through a literal war zone, which had me wondering. What in the world is everyone fighting over at this point? Resources? Territory? Immigration issues? Hell if I could guess.
Logic issues start to pile up the longer the journey goes on. The characters spend years terrified of radiation while living in a bunker, yet once they leave the island, nearly every place they travel through seems oddly radiation-free. That naturally begs the question of why staying underground for so long was such an absolute necessity in the first place. Then there’s the matter of fuel, because apparently gasoline is still plentiful enough to keep cars running across a shattered continent. It’s hard not to notice these things when the film leans so heavily on realism elsewhere.
Ultimately, Greenland 2: Migration isn’t a disaster, but it’s definitely a step down from the first film. The performances are perfectly fine, the world looks appropriately bleak, and it is still watchable. However, the writing and overall story feel less cohesive, with too many unanswered questions and logic holes to satisfy someone with a brain. It’s a sequel that moves forward geographically, but creatively, it is heading the other direction.
