Short movies are a mercy, but every once in a while you get a Greenland 2: Migration, which plays like a more thoughtful and meditative piece had been snipped within an inch of its life. The follow-up to 2020’s Greenland — a surprising meteor apocalypse film, which flew under the radar at the height of the pandemic — Ric Roman Waugh’s unlikely sequel picks up after the end of the world as we know it, and delivers many of the same thrills and dilemmas, with a couple of heart-in-mouth sequences too. However, as the story of an intercontinental odyssey, it ends up far too condensed to be emotionally affecting.
In case you missed the original, the second entry (called Greenland Migration on screen, a title with accidental SEO prescience) gets you up to speed with some quick flashbacks, and one hilarious retcon. The first Greenland ended with the remnants of American society making their way to a military bunker in, well, Greenland, and a brief epilogue saw them opening their blast doors nine months later. Migration, however, opens with that same footage being played in reverse; the door closes this time, as voiceover from gruff Scottish-American protagonist John Garrity (Gerard Butler) explains that radiation storms and further asteroid fragments falling from the sky forced humanity back underground.
