Greenland 2 is a welcome surprise — not because it is a swell movie, but because it gave this writer the chance to discover Greenland (2020), a film that came out during a time when older action heroes — such as Bruce Willis and Mel Gibson — and newer ones (who were still old) — such as Jason Statham and Gerard Butler — were belting out a flurry of groanworthy and immediately dismissible action fodder.

Since I’ve been neglecting most trailers for quite some time now (I used to love them before, but these days they give away almost everything), I assumed the wrong genre and promptly forgot the film even existed, until I came across a standee at a cinema… and then a faint memory prompted me to put it on my priority list.

Greenland is a family’s story about surviving a rogue asteroid named ‘Clarke’ (probably named after Arthur C. Clarke, the famed science fiction author) — and its few hundred thousand smaller pieces of debris — that literally rocks Earth (apologies for the pun).

In the last film, John, Allison and their diabetic seven-year-old son Nathan Garrity (Butler, Morena Baccarin and Roger Dale Floyd), receive a presidential message that instructs them to rush to the local airfield, where they will join a select handful of humanity that will be flown to an undisclosed location, where survivors in underground bunkers will help restart humanity. The location turns out to be — wouldn’t you know it — Greenland (maybe the film gave Trump ideas, who knows?). The main problem, until the last minutes of the climax, was getting to the ice-laden territory of Denmark.

Greenland 2: Migration is about apocalyptic survival and picks up where its predecessor left off

While Clarke, the planet-killer, is a threat, desperate humans turn out to be a more immediate problem. Greenland’s heart, and its head, however, were in the right place, as director Ric Roman Waugh (Kandahar, Angel Has Fallen, both with Butler) and screenwriter Chris Sparling (Buried, ATM) put the family first, the destruction second, and the politics out of the picture.

In Greenland 2: Migration — the title tells you everything you need to know — the story and the emotion pick up at the exact emotional beat the previous film ended and, astonishingly, maintains it in a leaner, at times more visually effects-laden, story.

It is now 12 years later, and Greenland could very well be a stand-in for the locations in the popular video game Death Stranding, since the air and the ground are grey and ash-laden. With the location quickly falling apart, John, Allison and Nathan (played by Roman Griffin Davis this time) must now journey to another haven.

Accompanying them, amongst others who end up dead, is Camille (Nelia Valery Da Costa), a girl roughly Nathan’s age, whose parents help John find a way to what may be their new home… if, that is, they can get through the thousands of humans left on Earth that are fighting for land and resources.

Although that is a silly but necessary trope, Waugh, Sparling, Baccarin and Butler deliver a nice end chapter to a film that one never knew one could enjoy.

Released by Lionsgate and HKC, Greenland 2: Migration is rated PG and features killer asteroids and elements and people at their worst

Published in Dawn, ICON, January 18th, 2026