Greenland 2: Immigration Review – The Sequel The Disaster Is Too Dangerous | Gerard Butler

Gerard Butler has had his fair share of sequels, but few have as much potential as Greenland 2: Migration. The original Greenland wasn’t even a traditional hit; It was released in theaters and on VOD at the end of 2020, when many movie theaters remained closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but it received some attention for being an unusually sober and thoughtful apocalypse film, especially since Butler had previously starred in films like Geostorm. Because Greenland was meant to survive the apocalypse rather than avoid it, any sequel would have to venture into the unknown with a completely different status quo.

Greenland 2 continues for a while, though it also steps back on some of the hope that ended the first film. The story once again joins engineer John Garrity (Gerard Butler), his managerial wife Allison (Morena Baccarin), and their teenage son Nathan (recast as Roman Griffin Davis) as residents of a bunker in Greenland. They are fortunate to have been chosen by the government to enter when Earth had become largely uninhabitable due to comet fragments five years earlier; They also feel angry about the loss of freedom, the difficult decisions, and the general claustrophobia that comes with living underground with hundreds of others. (Oddly enough, none of them seem to have made many friends despite being close to each other.)

The survivors are still out there because it turns out that the air purification mentioned at the end of the first movie was less obvious than they thought. John repeatedly ventures out of the bunker, but only with the right equipment and searching for additional resources. He also worries that troubled Nathan is putting himself in danger to explore the larger world. This conflict is brought to fruition when a series of earthquakes destroy the bunker once and for all. So, a small group of survivors, including the Garrity family, sets out to find a crater rumored to contain a large pocket of breathable air, located somewhere in France. In this case, the grass is always greener on the other side of the English Channel.

The country-hopping mission gives Greenland 2 somewhat greater scope than its predecessor, though it essentially recreates its central dynamic of John Garrity piecing together a fragmented, largely improvised path to the potential safety of his family. This time around, the environmental countdown clock is a little less steady — the worst of the comet’s fragments have long since hit the planet, but smaller fragments, radiation storms and the occasional tsunami still abound at irregular intervals — while a few additional health issues try to make up for any diminished urgency.

Butler’s frequent director Ric Roman Waugh — this is their fourth film together, and the first of two January films that Waugh has on deck, with the Jason Statham vehicle following — keeps the action moving, if not always particularly exciting. The most directly unnerving set pieces are also some of the silliest, as when a family crosses the dry English Channel and finds themselves at the mercy of a comically rickety series of barely there bridges. The layers of budget are evident when wide shots paint convincing scenes of post-apocalyptic landscapes, and then close-ups often involve wobbly stairs or dimly lit shootouts.

What’s more, though, this sequel doubles down on the seriousness of its predecessor, to the point of alternating between randomly sullen side characters and then getting all sarcastic about its cruelty. It’s fair for a post-apocalyptic story to be filled with some sadness; The problem is that Waugh has a greedy, insensitive way with human drama that doesn’t do his star any favors. Butler has eased into the presence of a dependable, rumpled middle-aged man, especially when allowed to use his Scottish accent. But it veers towards good father’s doves here.

He and Waugh seem desperate to turn this 98-minute adventure into a periodic funereal elegy, all while ignoring any facts that might uncomfortably echo our own world. At first, Greenland 2 recalls the episodic mood of the original film and expands on it as a Covid film, with its hidden equipment and justifiable paranoia about the radiation sickness people might get without it. However, little comes of this, other than the use of a radiation detector to reassure the characters that they don’t actually need the masks after a certain point in their journey. (There’s no need to see masked actors, of course, but this is also the moment when the series seems to abandon any sense of contemporary relevance.) Greenland 2: Migration takes itself seriously in all the wrong ways; She wants to maintain a safe distance from the real world, while urging the audience to shed tears for some imagined nobility.