REVIEW: The Gorge
The Gorge is a movie starring Anya Taylor-Joy and Miles Teller. It is an Apple TV movie and thus something that a lot of people will miss because they don’t pick up a particular streaming service. That would be a shame because this is the sort of movie that really deserved a theatrical release. Is it a groundbreaking piece of cinema?
No, it’s very much a standard sci-fi action movie with a few twists as well as an unusually well-developed love story. Really, I’d argue it reminds me of a lot of video game plots and wouldn’t have been out of place as a Resident Evil installment but that isn’t an insult. Because it would have been a very good Resident Evil installment.
The premise is that Levi Kane (Teller) is a US Marine sniper that has found himself drifting through life after his term of service. Levi takes jobs for private military contractors less because of the money, which he’s implied to have plenty of, and more because he simply doesn’t know what else to do with himself.
Contrasting him is Drasa (Anya Taylor-Joy), a Lithuanian sniper, who has sent most of her money home to her family but will soon no longer have one as her father is in the final stages of cancer. Both end up hired by a mysterious employer to watch opposite sides of a gorge in an unknown location.
This assignment is bizarre from the start with most of their duties consisting of watching the automated defenses and only rarely taking pot shots at strange creatures that emerge from the gorge called Hollow Men. Okay, less strange than tree zombies. Yeah, I said tree zombies. They’re zombies that are part tree: it’s in the name. Perfect for video game enemies.
Our snipers have no backup and the opposite sides of the gorge have apparently been watched since the end of World War II. Neither Levi or Drasa are especially curious individuals but even they are deeply troubled by the fact that zombies are real and are being contained in a single unmarked location.
What’s interesting about this movie is that it is mostly not about the zombies or the role of the snipers in keeping the monsters imprisoned below. No, oddly enough, it is the burgeoning romance between two broken people who mostly communicate with signs as well as music. Levi and Drasa are a surprisingly cute couple and I would have happily watched the entire movie with just them falling in love despite their tortured pasts. Roughly halfway through the movie, though, they get into the Gorge and exposed to the evil done by the Umbrella Corporation. Err, Darklake Corporation.
The latter half of the movie results in them exploring the gorge itself and that is full of some genuinely creepy body horror and monstrous events. It feels very video game-y with found footage that just so happens to reveal everything that is going on and is still intact decades later. Oh, and it’s right next to some of the evidence that shows their employers are, GASP, not on the level. From there, the movie continues to its expected conclusion and is a solid ride.
The Gorge could have been a bad sci-fi action movie that was, nevertheless, a lot of fun. Instead, the romance and chemistry between the lead actors make it so it’s a good sci-fi action movie that is cheesy as hell. The writers remembered that we might want to care about the protagonists and gave us reason to do so. Even those who don’t like romance will probably enjoy the unconventional one between two super-snipers.
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