‘Greenland 2: Migration’ Review: Gerard Butler Takes on the Apocalypse Once More
After surviving a comet that devastated Earth, a family is forced to flee their bunker refuge and cross a ruined Europe in search of a new home.
A mass-extinction event is coming to Greenland, and the protagonists of Greenland 2: Migration need to get out—fast. No, it’s not the U.S. Army led by Donald Trump invading the island he famously covets, but a genuine catastrophe: a natural disaster even more dangerous than the orange threat posed by the American president. Whatever the case, this looming danger forces the Garrity family—and everyone else holed up in a bunker—to go looking for new ground to survive on. If you’ve seen Greenland, you know the setup. If not, here’s a quick refresher.
The original film revolved around a comet on a collision course with Earth. Spoiler alert: the comet hits, and it wipes out roughly three-quarters of the known world. The Garritys—John, Allison, and their young son Nathan—manage to survive and, along with a group of others, reach Greenland, a kind of post-apocalyptic Promised Land. (Note: it’s entirely possible Trump saw the movie and thought it was a documentary.) By the time this sequel opens, many of the survivors are still alive inside the bunker, having formed a chaotic but functional society dedicated to the daily grind of staying alive.
Outside, however, things are getting worse. The air is toxic, radiation levels are rising, and earthquakes and other cataclysms are constant. The bunker no longer feels safe. One possible solution, according to Dr. Amina, the group’s resident scientist, is to head toward the original impact crater, where life might still be possible. When a earthquake-tsunami combo finally destroys the bunker, survival becomes a free-for-all. The escape is anything but friendly—communal living doesn’t seem to translate into solidarity when it’s time to flee—but soon the Garritys and the doctor are adrift in the ocean, chasing another promised land somewhere in what used to be France.
Greenland 2—which barely takes place in Greenland—focuses on this biblical exodus. John (Gerard Butler), Allison (Morena Baccarin), and now-teenage Nathan (Roman Griffin Davis) survive one calamity after another like those weighted toys that always land upright while everything around them collapses. Essentially a hybrid of disaster movie and survival thriller, the film strings together a series of miraculous escapes as the family travels through England and France—or rather, what remains of them.
The first Greenland was released at the height of the pandemic, going straight to streaming in a then-unusual move for a mid-budget effects-driven movie originally intended for theaters. It worked remarkably well, helped by the uncomfortable resonance between its extinction-level premise and the real-world crisis audiences were living through. The film performed well enough to justify a sequel, which arrives nearly six years later.
But the context has changed. The idea that Earth is rapidly becoming uninhabitable is now everywhere—in movies, TV shows, and the daily news—so the premise no longer feels urgent or fresh. Released theatrically, the sequel doesn’t offer visuals that outclass other disaster films; on the contrary, its production limitations and uneven CGI are more noticeable on the big screen. More importantly, Greenland 2: Migration is simply a weaker movie than its predecessor. The chain of events is barely credible, the script leaks from every angle, and the dialogue is blunt, functional, and purely expositional. Even by disaster-movie standards, the Garritys’ survival stretches plausibility well past the breaking point.
There are a few isolated moments where director Ric Roman Waugh shows a solid grasp of tension, but they’re rare. Once the family hits the road, all sense of realism evaporates, and the film starts to resemble a survival video game where the only goal is to reach the next level—by any means necessary. Beyond the vaguely tragic, biblical tone announced early on, very little in Migration carries real weight. At a time when this kind of story could lean into a certain realism (especially for a movie called Greenland), Waugh opts for pure fantasy instead. It may entertain for its brisk 90-plus minutes, but it’s instantly forgettable. These days, the news is far more apocalyptic.
