Greenland 2: Migration follows hot on the heels… no, hang on… comes six years after the first Greenland, which was a thoughtful apocalyptic thriller which somehow seemed to anticipate the Covid outbreak. The second movie has decided to aim for relevance more deliberately. The “Migration” in the title – what could be more of the moment?
Starting off in the sanctuary in Greenland where John Garrity (Gerard Butler) and family were heading in the first instalment, it plays a “see how you like it” plot flip on our heroes. First it asks the Garritys if they’d like to share their cramped space with a batch of 50 new arrivals. They’re reluctant. Shortly afterwards the Garritys become refugee/migrants themselves when chunks of the comet that wrecked life in the first movie start raining down on them again, rendering their fastness uninhabitable. They are cast adrift, sent with a few of their fellow bunker dwellers off onto the high seas in a boat to forge their own way in foreign lands, that’s if they ever get there.
Would you be able to get from Greenland to Liverpool in one of those unsinkable Tupperware lifeboats? I’m not sure you could, but Garrity and fellow travellers do just that. Liverpool, it turns out, is largely underwater, so there there is nothing in the way of sightseeing going on. No Liver Building. No Beatles tour. In any case they don’t stop long, and the city is in any case overrun with the worst sort of feral humanity – insert your own joke about Scousers here. The refugees point themselves towards London, before moving again, onwards into France, where another sanctuary of sorts is rumoured to exist.
There is jeopardy, lots of it. Radiation, tsunami, flood water, highway robbery, earthquake. The pattern is established early on – danger, danger overcome, danger. But then that is the nature of this sort of thing. But it all feels a bit mechanical this time out, as if no one can be bothered hiding the structure with a bit of decorative flim-flam, fancy writing, or committed acting.
What a strangely desultory film this is, in other words. No one character really gets a decent shake, and – because of the nomadic and episodic nature of the plot – neither does any place. France seems, you know, nice, and the journey there is fascinating – a dried-up English channel full of old sunken Spanish galleons and the like.
It’s not a bad film, or a frivolous or even cynical one (Hollywood standards apply). It’s just incredibly dour and, for all its changes of scenery, featureless. No one expects planet Earth to look like a funfair post-apocalypse, but this feels akin to flicking through a Pantone swatch of many shades of grey.
Still, there’s always Gerard Butler, always better than his reputation. There is a real actor inside there somewhere, behind the grunt of movies like the Has Fallen series. Morena Baccarin looks like someone held a gun to her head to make her reprise her role as Allison Garrity. Son Nathan is now played by Roman Griffin Davis rather than Roger Dale Floyd (who appears in flashback).
Apart from that, Nelia Valery Da Costa does make some impact as a very pretty young French woman the Garritys pick up en route. Which is something for Nathan to get hormonal over and a welcome distraction from the dawning suspicion that there is a biblical aspect to all of this, with Butler as some kind of latterday Moses leading his people through the wilderness.
Moses did not make it to the Promised Land, of course, which sets up an expectation about John Garrity’s ultimate fate and of this franchise. It cannot extend to a Greenland 3, surely. Surely?
Greenland 2: Migration – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
