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Greenland, released five years ago, is part of that elite cadre of Gerard Butler movies that are much better than you’d expect. That sounds like faint praise I know but Butler’s work is always entertaining (aside from the eyebrow searing racism of London has Fallen, a movie it’s worth crossing the street to avoid). Greenland is especially interesting because it combines the ticking clock of an extinction level event with a Twilight Zone-esque premise and a clear choice to go the opposite direction to how Butler’s movies usually travel. John Garrity, Butler’s character, is a structural engineer whose family is selected for emergency shelter. The marriage is collapsing; the world is ending but the very skills that have driven John and his family apart are why they’ve been chosen to survive.

That’s fun all by itself, but the movie builds on that with a defiant refusal to throw bodies in the way of the plot. Garrity kills one person, and it haunts him. The comet hits. The world ends. He and his family become part of the rebuilding process.

That process is central to Greenland 2: Migration, which releases next year. Notable for being the first disaster movie sequel in ages, it’s also cleverly picking up the threads from the previous movie. Here’s a few take homes from the trailer.

Five Years Later

Using the amount of time that’s passed as a bridge into the story is smart and emphasizes the shelter in place nature of the story. It also drops a second ticking clock in place and a much more insidious one. This time the issue isn’t a global extinction event, it’s surviving in the ruins of civilisation and of your old life.

The End Is the New Black

Given the massive success of Silo and Fallout, surviving the end of the world seems to be the latest thing. I’m very in favour of both this and survival itself and the radiation storms, comet fragments and general sense of a collapsing world are really nicely handled here.

Clarke Crater

While I’m more than a little dubious about the whole ‘it turns out the crater is the only place that isn’t soaked in doom!’, I love the symmetry of it. Also, in an age where we’re endlessly reminded that They Don’t Make Them Like They Used To, it’s nice to see some clear visual distinction between the world and the crater. And yes, it’s probably stock footage. But we’ve all had a bit of a week, let us have this.

The Exodus Boat

This is where it gets interesting. That’s a compound of a few hundred people and we only see one relative small lifeboat. I don’t have a specific model, but it looks a lot like a Viking. It’s not their smallest, which holds 22 people or their largest that holds 150. If I had to guess, it’s a HYN-100 which holds 106 people. Is it part of a larger fleet? Are they the only survivors? Are they blown off course from a larger group? Which oil rig did it come off?!

Who built that rope bridge?

At one point we see the Garrity family make their way across a rickety rope bridge, presumably at the crater? Who built that? And how are they going to feel about other survivors, especially those chosen to survive?

Last Ride

John has a line at the end of the episode about how he’ll protect his family to his last breath. That’s action movie for ‘Heroic sacrifice in act three’. Whether we get that or whether this is a fake out is unclear for now.

We’ll find out the truth on 9th January 2026. In the meantime you can catch up on Greenland on Prime Video – read our review here.