Greenland 2: Migration Lacks the Original's Spark

The best thing about the first Greenland was its almost resigned acceptance that the end of the world is not fun. That's not a shot across the bow of 2012 and other movies like it, just a recognition that Gerard Butler and Co. approached the genre's subject matter with a sensitivity it's not usually afforded. It used people not as blood bags to be burst open for an audience's amusement, but as a medium to ask simple but forceful questions about what you would do in the face of such a cataclysm. This satisfying seriousness was why I was pleasantly surprised by reports of a sequel and equally disappointed that Greenland 2: Migration turned out to be nothing more than a genre film trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. The original is a disaster movie where serious themes are surprising. The sequel is a survival movie where those themes are taken for granted.

Set five years after the original, Migration forces the Garrity family out of their bunker's protection with an onslaught of violent earthquakes, sending them on a journey across post-apocalyptic Europe to find the impact crater of the planet-killing asteroid known as Clark, where it's rumored that humanity has begun to rebuild. This sequel is another road trip, another wannabe epic of weary travelers hoping to reach a new safe haven. It is one part The Road, one part the war in Ukraine, and many parts human drama, but unlike the original, those disparate parts don’t fully mesh. The first film took disaster movie clichés and did something special with them. This one takes survival movie cliches and force-feeds them to you at face value.

Migration is similar to its predecessor in the sense that it's a road trip movie. It's somehow more somber than the first Greenland, but it's also less tortured, less desperate because the people in it are hardened survivors rather than ordinary, panicked Americans caught in the crosshairs of an unfamiliar disaster. It lacks the original's sense of anguished despair, and I imagine liking it would be easier without the context of every unexpected way in which the first movie excelled. I'm not saying that it lacks the seriousness of the original. I am saying that this seriousness isn't anything special anymore. 

The emotional punch of Migration isn't as forcefully raw, and that's because it's trying to copy the movies it's inspired by rather than mixing those ingredients into something new. It is a genre film, while the one before it was more, and sometimes a lot more. Another large part of what made the first Greenland tick so well was the presence of unexpectedly humanist themes in a Hollywood disaster blockbuster, but such themes are a participation grade for post-apocalyptic movies like Migration. The movie tries to experiment with other genres, but it only ends up watering down the original’s tropes into stereotype soup.

Post-apocalyptic movies are rarely uninteresting, if only because of the morbid nature of their subject matter, and to this one's credit, it features a couple of really good setpieces. The best sequence in the movie throws a rickety rope bridge spanning a seemingly bottomless canyon at our heroes, forcing them to endure a white-knuckle challenge of body and wit where a 500-foot drop is the price for failure. Another scene that works well is a firefight in a French forest between groups of militant survivors that looks and feels straight out of the war in Ukraine. The cinematography of this movie is also a significant step up from the original, though that's not unexpected for sequels anymore. However, the albeit-improved computer graphics still occasionally suffer from poor quality, and they're more numerous here than before; some poisonous-looking lightning that seems like it had been created with After Effects in a single afternoon takes the rotting cake. 

Perhaps the most disappointing thing about Migration is that it really thinks it's trying something new. Indeed, within the context of its own universe, it does. It just doesn't realize it has to distance itself from the movies that inspired it, and so it ends up living in the deepest, darkest part of their shadow. The first movie did its imperfect but genuine best to feel urgent, but this one adheres to well-worn cliches while thinking these tropes will land with the same impact as the original. The problem is that the world doesn't look like the one we know anymore, and these grounded, realistic dilemmas that once slipped around our consciousness to engage our fight-or-flight instincts are instead relegated to a disappointingly grim sense of fantasy.

The original Greenland is not fun, and it uses your expectations that it would be against you in ways that elevate it above the realm of mere disaster movies. But Migration doesn't possess such luxuries as surprise. In fact, its post-apocalyptic trappings are cliched and distinctly unsurprising, both because it's a sequel with many obvious influences and because it doesn't know it needs to be anything more than that. The original lit some unexpected sparks that occasionally turned into a blaze, but this one almost willingly fizzles out into ash. 

Greenland 2: Migration - 5/10

Exodus 22:21-22