If you’ve seen one sci-fi action-thriller rom-com, you’ve seen them all. I think I’m being quite literal with that one. The Gorge (now streaming on Apple TV+) whirrs up all those genres into a blender, with Scott Derrickson (The Black Phone, Sinister, Doctor Strange) behind the camera and Anya Taylor-Joy and Miles Teller in front of it, playing dead-shot snipers who meet with a vast chasm between them – also quite literal – and span it because they look a heck of a lot better when they’re in the same frame. So the film’s got star power, but the question is whether it can hold all of its wide variety of shit together.
The Gist: It seems Drasa (Taylor-Joy) lives in a hole. Like, an actual hole, dug into the dirt. There’s a reason for this – she patiently waits for an oligarch to emerge from his private jet so she can put a bullet in him from a squillion meters away. All it takes is one bullet. She pockets the shell and we cut to Levi (Teller), who sleeps in a regular apartment at least, but not very well. Nightmares, cold sweats, etc. Perhaps shitty sleep is what happens when you have 113 confirmed sniper kills – a conservative estimate. Bro has done some OPS. Always with the OPS in these movies, so many OPS. The black OPS, the covert OPS, the OPS within the other OPS. Anyway, he copes with the aftereffects of all the OPS by sitting on the beach and writing poetry and letting a dog come up to him and say hi. He pets the dog. Good dog.
And then Sigourney Weaver summons Levi. When Sigourney Weaver summons you, you allow yourself to be summoned. Full stop. I’d do anything for Sigourney Weaver, and so would you, even if you don’t know it yet. (She’s rather tall, you see.) And so Levi, an ex-Marine gone freelance, gets grilled – no, he doesn’t take medication for his PTSD, because it’d eff up his snipering abilities – and hired for a top-secret no-communication yearlong assignment. Meanwhile, Drasa visits her dad in Lithuania. She laments that the oligarch had four children, and Pops reminds her that the oligarch was an arms dealer whose goods resulted in many children’s deaths. Context! Then he drops the bomb: He has cancer. He’s doomed. And Drasa can’t be there for him, because she’s taken a top-secret no-communication yearlong assignment. He’ll be long gone before she gets back. Gutting. Just gutting.
Levi is flown out to an undisclosed location in God Knows Where. He’ll man a concrete tower – that looks like it was designed by, if not THE Brutalist, then A brutalist – overlooking a misty gorge. You can’t see into it what with all the fog. Levi’s predecessor in lighthouse-keeper-style lonely work tells Levi his job is to keep whatever’s in there from coming out, and before the guy vamooses, he theorizes that the gate to Hell is at the bottom of the gorge. Soldiers have been guarding the gorge since World War II ended, and the mission is such a secret, even the President doesn’t know about it. As Levi settles in, we cut to the predecessor guy and he gets picked up by a helicopter and then killed, so that’s the gig. It has a rather hard end date, it seems.
Now, on the other side of the gorge is a second brutal tower. Perhaps you can see where this is going. Levi does his duties – radio check, make sure the dangling mines are armed and the auto-turrets are fully loaded with ammo, test the satellite dishes that cloak the area from outside eyes – then aims his binoculars across the way. And there’s Drasa, doing the same dull-ass tasks on the other side. Now, the first rule of Gorge Guarding Club is, you don’t talk to the other tower. It’s totes verbotes. There’s Eastern forces in one and Western forces in the other, see. But Drasa is cute as hell. And flirty! From like 300 yards away! And Levi is quite a hunk-a of burnin’ man. Just imagine what they’d look like K-I-S-S-I-N-G!
WHAT IS YOUR NAME she magic-markers on a tablet, and it begins. She puts on a Ramones “Blitzkrieg Bop” 45 real loud – she’s got a turntable and vinyl up in there, fer pete’s sake – and dances and Levi laughs and he writes back and then all of a sudden some zombielike things start scaling the gorge and they have to get out their guns and blow ’em all away, which might be a metaphor if you put a little work into it. Phew. Their dirty deeds done, Levi writes HOW ABOUT DINNER on a whiteboard and then fires an RPG attached to a rope across the gorge and ziplines across and gets really hot and sweaty doing it. Hopefully more dirty deeds are about to be done, right horndogs? Right!
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The Gorge is like Aliens but with meet-cutes. And meet-uglies, because the monsters look like that guy from The Green Knight crossed with Game of Thrones White Walkers.
Performance Worth Watching: Taylor-Joy doesn’t take any of this seriously, nor should she. This is a rather silly movie, so she shifts into movie-star mode and finds a way to be funny, intelligent and medium-deep in her performance – and I swear there are a few fairly serious moments where she nearly breaks into laughter like Fallon in all those SNL skits.
Memorable Dialogue: Levi’s haunted by the many many people he’s killed: “You bury enough secrets, the graveyard runs out of room.”
Sex and Skin: NOT NEARLY ENOUGH. Hardly any at all, actually. We get one shot of blurry artsy blobs that are as bad, if not worse, than scrambled Skinemax.
Our Take: Watch out for the low-angle Sigourney shots. They’re deadly. They’ll hit you like a samurai who flashes a sword and you look down and suddenly your upper half is no longer connected to your lower half. Otherwise, we should follow Taylor-Joy’s lead and giggle at The Gorge in all its ridiculousness: the quasi-forbidden-fruit romance, the gunplay-heavy action, the dumbo-brained plot that begins to unfurl once Levi and Drasa fall into the gorge. Now, I don’t reveal that last point to spoil anything, but rather, to illustrate that this is the type of movie in which the lead characters fall into the gorge. They don’t sit on the edge of it and ponder the mysteries below while icing down their sexy swollen glands – this isn’t a damn Romanian art film or something, you know. (My hope that it would be a secret Godzilla movie was, alas, unfulfilled.)
Which is to say, without the enjoyably featherweight chemistry between Taylor-Joy and Teller, The Gorge likely would plummet over the precipice into forgettable sci-fi action dreck. The first half of the film is far stronger, Derrickson establishing the characters within a compelling premise, dangling will-they-or-won’t-they romantic tension overtop a sci-fi-ish mystery. It’s funny and clever in a rather goofy way, and then Levi and Drasa fall into the gorge and find themselves in a conspiratorial shoot-’em-up horror adventure that, frankly, is just another bug hunt. Just another bug hunt with one-and-a-half-shades-too-cheap CGI and a distractingly squashed-flat green-screen palette that Derrickson’s reasonably well-choreographed action direction can’t quite compensate for. I yawned at the plot twists and revelations, and was moderately engaged in all the chintzy mayhem, and not-so-secretly yearned for Taylor-Joy and Teller to find a quiet spot away from the chaos so they could fall on top of each other a couple more times. Spoiler alert: They don’t. This movie’s priorities are all upside-f—ing-down, I tell ya.
Our Call: The Gorge is smooth-brained escapism that’s just entertaining enough to get a pass. So STREAM IT, and meanwhile, Teller and Taylor-Joy’s destination-wedding rom-com awaits!
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.