It's been a while since we've had an Apple Original movie, but for Valentine's Day they dropped the unlikely rom-com-slash-sci-fi-horror flick The Gorge about a couple of cute young snipers who fall in love then fall into Hell on Earth.
We open on Drasa (Anya Taylor-Joy, Emma, Furiosa), a Lithuanian sniperette who's been holed up in a blind for 10 days overlooking an airport awaiting her target whom she dispatches with a shot from thousands of meters away. We are then introduced to Levi (Miles Teller, Top Gun: Maverick, Fant4stic) waking up from a nightmare then hanging alone at the beach, writing poetry.
He is summoned to meet with Bartholomew (Sigourney Weaver, Galaxy Quest), a mysterious woman from what he deduces is a private military outfit who is seeking someone with no personal attachments, that no one would miss if he didn't come back. Haunted by all the killing he's done and alone, he signs up for the one-year-long gig. Meanwhile, Drasa is learning that her father is terminally ill and planning on unaliving himself on Valentine's Day. She was also spotted somehow in the vicinity of the opening hit, so she needs to lay low. (Perhaps for a year?)
Levi wakes up on a plane after being sedated approaching the drop zone. The plane's crew can't tell him where he is and after he parachutes down, he'll have to travel a couple dozen miles over treacherous terrain to arrive at his post at the titular gorge where he is briefed about things by Basil Exposition J.D. (Sope Dirisu, Slow Horses). The fog-shrouded gorge is home to what previous guards have dubbed The Hollow Men (after a T.S. Eliot poem). It has been guarded since the late-1940s after 2400 soldiers never returned from a mission down there.
It's guarded from two towers, theirs on the west side with the east tower presumably staffed by Soviet/Russian personnel. His job is to patrol his side's gorge rim, checking the auto-turrets and satellite jammers keeping it hidden from Google Earth, replacing the hanging mines, etc. There's a garden patch, plenty of supplies (more on this later), solar power, and there is to be absolutely no contact with the other tower's guard. (Why not? Because reasons.) J.D. then heads off to be picked up and we discover why Bartholomew doesn't want family men for the job.
Starting in September, Levi begins his vigil, patrolling, reading, checking in once a month via shortwave radio where the voice on the other end doesn't want anything more than to know whether any contact with what's in the gorge had occurred? No? Then talk to you in a month.
He also naturally notices the hottie across the way (wo)manning the East Tower. After quite some time, he looks through his binoculars and sees her holding a sign asking his name. He replies via dry erase board that they're not supposed to have contact to which she replies by shooting his drink off the rail. He reciprocates by shooting her beer bottle and the flirting begins. They play chess by sending the moves by message (yes, stolen from Dawn of the Dead) and even make up ersatz drum kits to bash away. (While this may seem like a meta riff on the stars prior roles in The Queen's Gambit and Whiplash, they claim it was in the script already and they asked for it to be removed.)
The also manage to rile up the creatures of the gorge by blasting Ramones music and while dancing around, almost realizing too late that they were scaling the walls from the abyss. Much shooty-shooty-bang-bang ensues. Then they go back to flirting for months, wondering what the small rockets they observe emerging from the fog are about for a moment, culminating in Levi rigging a zip line across the ravine and scooting over to meet Drasa up close and personally. On his way back, creatures trigger a mine and shrapnel severs the line, sending him plummeting into the unknown. (Luckily he had a parachute on!) Drasa races to grab some gun, gear and her own chute and leaps after him.
Down at the bottom of the gorge, they are surrounded by sickly colored fogs and beset upon by fantastical creatures which seem borne from an orgy between Hieronymus Bosch, Salvador Dali, and the designers of Annihilation and The Mist. As they travel along uncovering the truth of what's going on down there, it's like a nature hike through Dante's Inferno except as written by a grade-school dropout.
I've seen reviews that cut miles of slack for the issues with the script by Zach Dean (writer of the unremembered Amazon Original flick, The Tomorrow War, whose premise was so fatally flawed by the need to be cool more than smart) and the missus is one of those who really enjoyed The Gorge, but there were too many details demanding they not be thought about on top of the obligatory suspension of disbelief starting with the entire setup of their mission.
There is this massive area which is so secret that the people charged with securing it aren't told where it is, there's a no-fly zone around it (except for the chopper pilots who fly in at the end), it uses jamming tech to prevent satellites from seeing it, and it's guarded by TWO people who are forbidden to contact each other and check-ins are monthly meaning that if something happens to them, say the monsters get them, it could be 29 days before anyone suspects there's a problem? You're not supposed to warn your counterpart that there are monsters coming up their side where they can't see them coming while your autoturrets fire across the gorge at them?
Who is restocking the towers with ammo, mines, parts for the jammers, etc.? Where did the books and the stereo and the records come from? Why are the sentries required to travel on foot for a day, climbing treacherous mountain passes that they could fall off of instead of just flying them in? If the stuff in the gorge is so dangerous, why is there a piece of tech there for who to use and how did they not find the Basil Exposition film can? If the creatures are just monsters, why are they able to lay traps? Don't know, don't know, don't don't don't know know know.
We're already expected to buy into the core premise of The Gorge while ignoring all the stupidity surrounding it and it's too big an ask. All I could think was that there should be a lot more people on the site covering shifts, daily contacts if not a zillion security cameras monitored by a base, so many basic things all shoved to the side because we need to have two young(er) attractive people getting horned up by each other to make the plot go.
Which brings us to our cast. At the time of filming two years ago, Teller and Taylor-Joy were 36 and 26, respectively. He's the right age for a former Marine who went into the mercenary business and is now wracked by guilt, but she is simply too young. How did this kitten get into the long-distance head bullet delivery business and rise to the top tiers?
It's been a while since we've had a case of Sandra Bullock Syndrome - when we're supposed to believe a perfectly attractive woman can't seem to find a man interested in her (coined by me after Bullock's roles in The Net and While You Were Sleeping) - but no way a hottie like Taylor-Joy doesn't have dudes panting after her. Mind you, they're a cute couple and have good chemistry, but she's simply too young. Someone like Blake Lively (who was 34 when this filmed and has done accents and action drama in The Rhythm Section, where she was much better than the script) would've been better.
Where The Gorge does excel is in the design of the creatures and environments down there. Everything is creepy and horrifying and director Scott Derrickson (Doctor Strange, The Black Phone) stages the frights well. Bonus kudos to cinematographer Dan Laustsen (John Wick 2-4, Nightmare Alley & four other Guillermo del Toro films) for his moody lens work.
As with all content on Apple TV+ it's in Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos audio. Visually, the colors are rich, but muted, with only a few spots where HDR brightness is present. The Atmos mix has top level activity during storms and helicopter flyovers, but none it is particularly demo material.
While the missus and other less-demanding viewers seemed to have fun with The Gorge, the piling on of unnecessarily dumb decisions just killed it for me. It wouldn't have taken much to fix almost everything wrong, too. Here's how:
- Have Levi flown directly to the gorge via helicopter from an airbase he doesn't know where. The chopper also ferries in a small shipping container filled with supplies, ammo, food, books, movies, whatnot for his stay.
- Convey the info J.D. gives in a briefing video and have check-ins be daily and more than just surly radio voice only wanting to know if there's contact.
- Have both towers be in contact with each other to build rapport and support each other in fighting monsters.
- Eliminate Drasa's backstory scenes so we know nothing about her until they start working together. The twist will be that she works for the Evil Company that hired Levi and when he falls in, she was supposed to just call in that they need a new sucker for the West Tower.
Everything else can pretty much remain the same, even having a too-young, inexplicably hot murder chick on the other side. Maybe have the monsters a little more conversational, too?
Score: 5/10. Catch it on Apple TV+.
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