TL;DR – A quasi-religious themed sequel doesn’t live up to the first film, unfortunately.

Post-Credit Scene – There is no post-credit scene.

Disclosure – I paid for the Amazon Prime subscription used to watch this film.

Greenland 2: Migration Review Introduction

Back in 2021, I was entirely surprised by a film. Greenland took what could have been a run-of-the-mill disaster/apocalypse film and filled it with real emotional weight. It even made it onto my best film list for that year. Since then, I have been wondering if they would go back to that world, and while we didn’t get an Australian release, I am glad to finally be getting a look at it today.  

So, to set the scene, in the five years since the Clarke devastation, fragments still impact the Earth, causing all sorts of radiation issues. John Garrity (Gerard Butler), his family, Allison (Morena Baccarin), and Nathan (Roman Griffin Davis) are still living in the bunker under Thule Airbase in Greenland. But things have stretched on longer than anyone expected, and they are now surviving by salvaging the ruins of humanity that wash up. The hope was to wait for the radiation levels to drop, but already large areas of North America have been made uninhabitable due to it. But when the tectonic plates shift and the base is destroyed, the Garrity family and the handful of survivors must make a mad dash across a waring Europe to reach the Clarke creator, the one place potentially free of radiation.  

Migration or Exodus

The one striking thing about Greenland 2 is how it feels like a missed opportunity in so many places. They took the framework of escape from the first film, and instead of wrapping it in real human emotion, they wrapped it in a quasi-religious allegory. This is not me saying that religious allegories are bad; when they are done well, such as Wake Up Dead Man, it can be exquisite. However, here it is just: insert a Moses allegory into John, insert a couple of action sequences that had no impact, and stop to have an oddly inserted discussion about vaguely religious themes just so we can reference it in the finale. Everything about its just a surface level exploration, almost like it was a crux for a story that was not working.  

Thus, the choices the film made mean that there is a wake of thematic causalities along the way for the film. The first is the worldbuilding, which gives us a thirty-second wrap-around before yanking the rug out from underneath us. Never once did I feel like this was a real world with real stakes. The next casualty was the humanity. There was death and destruction in the first film, but there was a core humanity to it all. We get none of that here. Most of the characters are given no depth; I mean, you have Morena Baccarin, and you insist on doing nothing with her.     

Hello Iceland

While I was quite disappointed by the final product, it is not that it was a bad film, just that after how good the first was, the return to average was a sadness. However, I do want to take some time to talk about what did work. The first is the location work done by the team. I feel that just about all the location work that was not in cities was filmed in Iceland, which could have been overdone, but it worked for this type of film. It does provide a stark contrast between the black soils and the life growing in it to perfectly create the thematic backdrop of this film. Then all the work they did to dress the city locations helped set this world falling into ruin.  

Recommendation

In the end, do we recommend Greenland 2: Migration? Unfortunately, I don’t think I can. I mean it is not a bad film, but it is sadly a dull one. I did have such high hopes after its first outing, and I am frankly sad that it meandered rather than excelled.  

Have you watched Greenland 2: Migration? Let us know what you thought in the comments below. If you liked Greenland 2: Migration, we would recommend A Quiet Place: Day One to you because it is playing in the same thematic space as Greenland 2, but it does not lose its humanity along the way.

By Brian MacNamara: You can follow Brian on Bluesky at @Tldrmovrev, when he’s not chatting about Movies and TV, he’ll be talking about International Relations, or the Solar System.

Feel free to share this review on social media and check out all our past reviews and articles Here, and have a happy day. 

Credits – All images were created by the cast, crew, and production companies of Greenland 2: Migration
Directed by – Ric Roman Waugh
Written by – Mitchell LaFortune & Chris Sparling
Based on – Greenland by Chris Sparling
Music by – David Buckley
Cinematography by – Martin Ahlgren
Edited by – Colby Parker Jr.
Production/Distribution Companies – STXfilms, Anton, Thunder Road, G-BASE Film Production, Cinemachine, & Lionsgate
Starring – Gerard Butler, Morena Baccarin, Roman Griffin Davis, Amber Rose Revah, Sophie Thompson, Trond Fausa Aurvåg, William Abadie, Nelia Da Costa, & Tommie Earl Jenkins
Rating – Australia: M;