Ric Roman Waugh’s 2020 disaster picture Greenland was one of the more memorable films of the COVID-19 pandemic, thrown by poor timing from theatres to streaming but somehow capturing a part of the zeitgeist at the same time. It was an innovative spin on a broadly tired genre, capturing an entire global cataclysm from a small, personal viewpoint. It focused on character over spectacle, and showcased the strong human drive to survive against all odds.

Waugh’s long-delayed Greenland 2: Migration, which is now streaming via Amazon Prime, feels like a film about driving a succession of cars and vans through Western Europe. That deeply personal edge in the original film now feels badly blunted. Stars Gerard Butler and Morena Baccarin both return, but this time their race for survival feels perfunctory. Worse than that: it feels dull.

The new instalment picks up on survivors John and Allison Garrity five years after they successfully escaped from North America to an American military bunker in Greenland, and civilization was decimated by a massive comet strike. When a series of destabilised tectonic plates shift, they are forced to escape earthquakes and tsunami all over again and make their way to France – where a rumoured paradise has blossomed inside the comet’s crater.

Making a sequel to a disaster film seems an unprecedented enterprise. Usually a family unit runs or drives away from a series of eye-popping visual effects sequence for 90-to-120 minutes before finding refuge among a small community of lucky survivors. As viewers we do not get to see what happens next, and I think for good reason. Apocalyptic scenarios like this can be very uplifting in the end. Post-apocalyptic scenarios are deeply miserable. After all, what is the best result for characters who survived the end of the world the first time around? To survive some more? To continue escaping disaster?

Migration follows John, Allison, and teenage son Nathan (Jojo Rabbit‘s Roman Griffin Davis) across the sea and the desolate remnants of the land. The close, personal perspective of the first film is partially abandoned here in favour of tsunamis, meteor strikes, and pitched gun battles. It is a morose, miserable affair – how could it be anything else? – and it foreshadows narrative beats so heavily that nothing is a surprise. The first Greenland featured scenes so tense that it was difficult to foresee how its characters would survive. Migration is, instead, ultimately rather boring.

There is also a strange dichotomy going on where some genuinely thoughtful and inventive scientific speculation is presented about the state of a post-impact Earth, but then within the same scene characters will be seen using petrol and smoking cigarettes half-a-decade after any of these things would have been manufactured. The lack of realism and scientific accuracy of these things in a populist disaster flick are not a deal breaker – in many respects the silliness is a welcome part of the exercise – but including good and bad reasoning alongside one another simply frustrates.

Butler and Baccarin both revisit their characters with talent and verve. Roman Griffin Davis is a strong enough presence that you don’t even notice the film has replaced the original actor. It is wasted effort with a dull and maudlin screenplay, and a listless, dour tone.