Director: Ric Roman Waugh
Writers: Mitchell LaFortune, Chris Sparling
Stars: Gerard Butler, Morena Baccarin, Roman Griffin Davis
Synopsis: The surviving Garrity family must leave the safety of the Greenland bunker and embark on a perilous journey across the decimated frozen wasteland of Europe to find a new home.
The disaster movie is our most hopeful genre. After all the chaos, the worst instincts of humanity, and the sheer magnitude of the destruction, the heroes often prevail and there’s a metaphorical rainbow at the end. The end is when we learn that after the tremendous disaster people will be better, kinder, and more compassionate. It’s the artistic embodiment of the light at the end of the tunnel. Which is why most disaster movies don’t get sequels. With a sequel you squelch the idea that everything’s going to be O.K. The only thing that can really happen after the apocalypse is the post-apocalypse, a grim, grimy world without hope except for the legends that emerge from the wastelands. Greenland 2: Migration attempts to build a bridge between these two disparate thoughts.
The filmmakers behind Greenland 2: Migration have attempted to combine the post-apocalyptic and the disaster film and it has mixed results. On the one hand the environmental stakes are very high as space rocks are still falling from the sky, horrible storms, earthquakes, and tidal waves are still trying to kill people. Then there are the people with guns, or just people desperate to survive. It begins to feel like a copy of the original film, but without the sense of safety in numbers that the first film had. The Garrity family, led by John (Gerard Butler) realizes that, with their shelter collapsing around them, that they have to go in search of the mythical new and safe civilization. This new eden is inside the Clarke crater, the crater caused by the largest space rock to hit Earth in the first film. They face terrifying perils, but it feels like the stakes are lower and lower as they survive each new challenge with ease and barely a scratch on any of them.
This family is not only unkillable, but the luckiest people on the face of the Earth, John’s obvious radiation sickness not withstanding. They’re sort of a bad luck charm for everyone around them, though. The Garrity family gains and loses allies so quickly you start to forget their names if you ever caught them in the first place. Greenland 2: Migration is a shorter film than its predecessor and it makes the story suffer in this case. The pace of the script by Mitchell LaFortune and Chris Sparling is a bit like trying to catch your feet underneath you when you miss judge the speed of a moving walkway. New characters are established and erased within a scene of each other. You can barely catch your breath as you go from one action scene to another. There are sequences that could be a whole film in and of themselves, but are shortened almost abruptly in order to move on to the next idea.
Those crazy and intense sequences become the reason the film remains entertaining, though. As the film whips through each scenario, we get to see excellent action sequences staged by director Ric Roman Waugh and his crew. One of the most exciting, if unnecessarily long and complicated, sequences is as the Garrity’s come to a newly formed chasm created by the shifting of the new tectonic plates. If that sentence doesn’t make a ton of sense, it’s because the science of the film is a bit more “rule of cool” than cold hard facts. They first descend to a sort of platform where a rope bridge extends to a tall column of rock in the middle of the chasm. There’s very high winds flying at them, whipping them about the whole time. Then on the column they have to get on all fours to crawl across a ladder laid on its side to the piece of land on the other side. As an earthquake happens and rocks begin to crumble it becomes a mad dash. It’s a thrilling sequence, but add in the human element of people panicking and it gets even more tense and exciting.
Greenland 2: Migration is an exciting film. Much like its predecessor there’s a lot to unpack and escape in with this “what if” scenario. While keeping mostly focused on this one family unit, the film eschews the grandiose message of many films like it in that they aren’t trying to find blame with world leaders or explain how this all came about because of human actions. It’s a film that relies heavily on a suspension of disbelief and tries too hard to recapture what made the first film so unique. It’s a rehash in many ways and feels like the filmmakers didn’t have another idea, just that they wanted to play in this sandbox again with whatever they could throw at the wall. Greenland 2: Migration is a good vehicle for thrilling action set pieces, but it leaves you wanting more from the story and the characters.
