Movie Review – Greenland 2: Migration

Anyone who knows me even a little knows there is a special place in my heart for natural disaster films. The good ones. The bad ones. Even the borderline unwatchable ones that appear on occasion on SyFy. When Greenland was released in 2020, it immediately made it to the top of list of favorite natural disaster films because it was actually a great piece of filmmaking. It told the tale of one families impossible journey to make it to a bunker to survive an incoming comet. It avoids the farfetched aspects of many of these films and concentrates on the human element of the story. The sequel is no different.

John Garrity (Gerard Butler) and his wife Allison (Morena Baccarin) find themselves living in the bunker for five years as the island batters them with earthquakes and radioactive storms keep them underground. There are rumors that the Clark Crater (the comet’s final crash site five years earlier) is the safest place on earth because the crater’s edges keep out the radioactive storms and unbreathable air. When their bunker finally gives way, John, Allison, their son, and others living in the bunker take a lifeboat over to Europe to find this crater. The fall of civilization shows a continent at odds with itself, but within the wars that rage on at the end of the work, there are still good people. People who help Allison and John to get where they need to go.

What I find so engrossing in this is how it concentrates on showing the best of humanity instead of the worst. Most end of the world content tends to show the absolute worst of us. That we can never do better than our weakest member. This film doesn’t fall into that trap. Even when soldiers barely hanging on to the day meet John and Allison, they find ways to help them. Likewise, John and Allison help others whenever they can. They are the best of us. And in today’s society, we need more of that. More kindness. More being there for each other.

Kudos to this film for giving us a truly intense scene where the characters must traverse a ravine on nothing more than a rope bridge and a rickety ladder. Wind makes this difficult and earthquakes make it unsurvivable but John and Allison get themselves across with their son and manage to help others in the process. I wasn’t the only one urging them across faster in the theater. Intense filmmaking at its finest.

Baccarin and Butler put in emotional performances and Morena Baccarin has really grown on me in recent years. Early in her career I found her to be a bit flat but she has improved her acting chops. Now, I look forward to her in each project she appears in. Gerard Butler will always be a bit of a badass to me, but these two Greenland films give him a softer side. The family man beneath action hero.

This film reminded me of two things. The Land Before Time and Everest. In the former, the dinosaurs search for a valley that offers them safety and food in contrast to the world at large which very much wants to kill them. In Everest, climbing the world’s tallest mountain seems like a fun time until the weather changes your plans. Similar plot points from both these films make up Greenland 2, without the dinosaurs though.

As an action film and a disaster film, I find this to be a worthy sequel to the watchable first film that didn’t get nearly as much attention as it should have given the events of 2020. These two films parallel current events well as we try to keep society from falling apart around us. It focuses on people migrating to a new place for a better chance at survival and shows the best of humanity showing up to help. It’s what we could be if we only tried.

4 out of 5 stars.