{"id":400163,"date":"2026-01-08T17:24:11","date_gmt":"2026-01-08T17:24:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/400163\/"},"modified":"2026-01-08T17:24:11","modified_gmt":"2026-01-08T17:24:11","slug":"gerard-butler-in-a-dull-dystopian-slog","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/400163\/","title":{"rendered":"Gerard Butler in a Dull Dystopian Slog"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tIt\u2019s early, but \u201cGreenland: Migration<\/a>\u201d is already a candidate for worst movie of the year. I don\u2019t say that because I have some knee-jerk aversion to Gerard Butler<\/a> movies. I\u2019ve been reviewing about one of them per year for longer than I can count (usually in January, the dumping-ground release period that\u2019s become the Butler zone), and a few of them, like \u201cPlane\u201d<\/a> and \u201cDen of Thieves\u201d<\/a> and its sequel<\/a>, have a pleasing pulp flair. When Butler plays bruiser cops or underworld dogs, he\u2019s got a gruff charisma. But \u201cGreenland: Migration\u201d is one of the soggiest excuses for a sequel in memory. The first \u201cGreenland,\u201d released at the end of 2020, was an environmental disaster movie. The new one is a post-disaster slog. It should have been called \u201cRubble.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe end-of-days scenario of \u201cGreenland,\u201d about a comet getting ready to hit the earth, rhymed, in a coincidental but resonant way, with the pandemic. It was like \u201cDeep Impact\u201d made on a B-movie budget, with a calamitous mood that was effective in a v\u00e9rit\u00e9 way. But it was also a banal family-splits-apart-and-comes-together movie.<\/p>\n

\n\tSo now that that comet \u2014 or, in fact, a collection of rock fragments \u2014 has hit the earth, what is there left for \u201cGreenland: Migration\u201d to show us? I figured that the director, Ric Roman Waugh, returning from the first film, would find a contrived way to stage another extinction-level event. But no. \u201cMigration\u201d starts off in a bunker, where Butler\u2019s John Garrity is waiting out the apocalypse with his wife, Allison (Morena Baccarin), and teenage son, Nathan (Roman Griffin Davis). Most of the planet has been destroyed; America, Canada, Iceland \u2014 all gone. The earth\u2019s cities are wastelands (we see the twisted bottom of the Eiffel Tower sticking up out of the ruins), and if you go outside the radiation can kill you.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tYet there\u2019s a place that awaits in Western Europe, an oasis of green salvation like that Whole Foods commune in the last \u201cMad Max\u201d film. It\u2019s called the Crater, and once the bunker is destroyed by a cosmic storm, that\u2019s the destination that Garrity and his family head for. This means they will journey, with a handful of comrades, from the bunker to a small metal covered tugboat that takes them across the ocean (it\u2019s like a bunker on waves), until they reach Liverpool (which is covered in water). Then they find dry land and hook up with a Nigerian van driver who tells them, \u201cThe world is a dangerous place now. People are so desperate they will kill you for scraps of food.\u201d They wind up in the ruins of London in a cramped apartment full of Alzheimer\u2019s patients that\u2019s like one more bunker.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cGreenland: Migration\u201d is a dystopian dud. It\u2019s like the boring middle section of a picaresque disaster film, minus the showy kickoff and catchy climax. The characters sit, then drive, then fend off marauders, then come upon the former English Channel, which is now drained and looks like something out of \u201cDune\u201d if it were set on earth. Butler, bearded and morose, has rarely registered with so little force onscreen. There are two action sequences that briefly wake you up: a comet shower over the woods, and a walk across a canyon on a treacherous rope bridge. But by the time enough people die in this sequence, it\u2019s just John, Monica, and Nathan plodding onward.<\/p>\n

\n\tI think the problem with \u201cGreenland: Migration\u201d is that the folks who made it (Butler is one of the producers) actually think that they\u2019re crafting a serious social statement; that\u2019s why they forgot to entertain us. The film has not one but two free-floating \u201cpolitical\u201d themes. Like almost every disaster film, it presents itself as a didactic metaphor for man-made environmental catastrophe. But the other theme, suggested by the title, is that Garrity and his fellows aren\u2019t just survivors wandering the wilderness. They\u2019re migrants, which means that the movie can chime with the current global crisis regarding migrants and refugees everywhere. The trouble is that \u201cGreenland: Migration\u201d is so dull it makes you want to migrate out of the theater.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s early, but \u201cGreenland: Migration\u201d is already a candidate for worst movie of the year. I don\u2019t say…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":400164,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[64,63,134,156154,212872,344],"class_list":{"0":"post-400163","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-gerard-butler","12":"tag-greenland-migration","13":"tag-movies"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400163","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=400163"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400163\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/400164"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=400163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=400163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=400163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}