It’s not often I would say “this bad film should have been a bad TV series,” but that’s kind of my reaction to Greenland 2: Migration (2026), the unlikely sequel to a surprisingly decent disaster film. Frankly, a longer running time might have fixed its flaws — some of them, anyway. A properly cooked script with stronger worldbuilding might have helped, too.
What happens after the end of the world? In Greenland 2, it involves a dreary underground life in a remote Greenland bunker for the Garrity family — father John (Gerard Butler), mother Allison (Morena Baccarin), and son Nathan (Roman Griffin Davis). Five years after the Clarke comet strike, the survivors at Thule Air Base have their hands full managing scarce resources and keeping their infrastructure going, let alone building a future for the human race. Life outside now comes with new dangers, including volcanic eruptions, devastating earthquakes, and lethal radiation storms. When one of these follow-on disasters renders the base uninhabitable, everyone flees, and the Garritys wind up in a small lifeboat headed southeast toward Europe with a number of other survivors. Dr. Casey Amina (Amber Rose Revah) theorizes that the site of the impact crater near the Mediterranean Sea may be a “safe zone” protected from the radiation, and there are also rumors that the authorities are protecting that area to nurture a new settlement for humanity. Sticking together, the Garritys make their way across war-torn, climate-wracked Europe in search of a future for their family.
While Greenland certainly wasn’t high art, it did deliver solid entertainment, wringing from its simple, campy plot a fairly compelling, semi-realistic survival tale. The hook was that the Garritys were chosen by a callous selection process that privileged them above a vast majority of the world’s people who were doomed to die in the coming cataclysm. This gave moral and ethical weight to their dilemma, and elevated the film’s B-movie spectacle into something slightly more nuanced — aided immeasurably by great performances from Butler and Baccarin. Greenland 2: Migration strives to extend the metaphor; if the original critiqued the ruthless systems of the past, the sequel aims to promote a forward-looking message about building something new. Well, the symbolism is clear, but it’s couched in flimsy surface detail. The result is a plodding, unconvincing sequence of video-game challenges as the family moves from point A to point B. As exemplars of diligence and cooperation, the Garritys may be showing the way — but not interestingly, and their prominence relegates every other character to incidental status, present merely to move the plot or tragically illustrate the dangers of the new world. Perhaps in a TV show, these folks would last long enough to earn our allegiance, so that we might root for their success or feel their loss. But they flit past so quickly they barely feel like people at all. Meanwhile, the “chosen” people of the Greenland redoubt don’t display enough collective expertise to justify their frantic assembly; their behavior in the bunker and during the subsequent crisis doesn’t differentiate them, calling the entire first film into question. Once again, Butler and Baccarin are much better than the script, and the visuals are captivating at times, but overall this one is a mechanistic, shallow dud.
