NOW IN THEATERS! Director Ric Roman Waugh drops us back into his disaster-thriller sandbox with Greenland 2: Migration, a sequel that doesn’t waste time warming up. Screenwriters Chris Sparling and Mitchell LaFortune build this story like a survival relay race — one crisis handing the baton to the next — while the Garrity family tries to stay in one piece long enough to find a place worth calling home. We find our heroes living in a bunker five years after Comet Clarke crashed onto Earth’s surface. Limited communication still circulates around the world. North America and Europe are devastated by extreme weather events and high radiation levels.
John Garrity (Gerard Butler), his wife, Allison Garrity (Morena Baccarin), and their teenage son, Nathan Garrity (Roman Griffin Davis), are living with other survivors in an underground bunker complex in Greenland. Food, water, and clean air are scarce. Allison is on the committee that oversees the physical, emotional, and mental survival of the bunker’s citizens. The current problem they face is that more survivors have found the bunker, and its limited resources make it difficult to let them in.
Before they can decide, an earthquake destroys the bunker, forcing its inhabitants to seek safety. With Dr. Amina (Amber Rose Revah) providing the scientific smarts, they head to Italy, where the comet struck. Rumor has it that the comet’s crater has become a thriving ecosystem. Our party commandeers an abandoned lifeboat, which drifts to Liverpool. From there, they must cross the English Channel before finally reaching the crater. Unfortunately, chaos and anarchy reign, and warring factions make it almost impossible for them to reach their final destination. Also, John is dying of cancer.
Morena Baccarin as Allison Garrity, Gerard Butler as John Garrity and Roman Griffin Davis as Nathan Garrity in Greenland 2: Migration. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Lionsgate
“…an earthquake destroys the bunker, forcing its inhabitants to seek safety.”
Full disclosure: I have not seen the first film, but that doesn’t matter. The brief recap drops you right into the action. I assume the first film is about surviving a cataclysmic meteor event. Greenland 2: Migration is essentially The Walking Dead. We survived, and we need to make the best of it. What has society turned into? Who can you trust? Is bartering the currency of the apocalypse?
The experience of this film is like riding a dark ride at Disneyland. It moves us, the audience, from one action set piece to the next, following a family trying to stay together until we run out of plot and get to the end. Each “room” we enter is a mini-tale, beginning with a scene and ending like a disconnected chapter of a book. Every chapter features an attack by more comet debris or an electrical storm. There’s also a Star Trek element: everyone the family meets might as well be wearing a “red shirt.” The family story is fine, but we’ve seen it before. No one is forgotten or left behind. But these weather events exist solely as plot devices. And the award for the biggest plot hole is the entire war-front scene.
Greenland 2: Migration is all mind-numbing action with nothing to say. If you’re a fan of Gerard Butler or Morena Baccarin, you will probably have fun with this one. Otherwise, it’s a skip.
"…all mind-numbing action with nothing to say."
