2025 | PG-13 | starring Miles Teller, Anya-Taylor Joy, Sigourney Weaver | directed by Scott Derrickson | 2h 7m | 3 out of 5 stars |
A high trained operative named Levi (Miles Teller) is chosen by the government for his lack of family, friends and ties to society to travel to Lithuania and man a guard tower over a large chasm in the ground. Not even the previous guard or the guards before that know what they are guarding. One night he spies on the opposite site of the gorge his Russian counterpart, Darsa (Anya Taylor-Joy) and the two form a friendship over written messages across the gorge. When their bond becomes strong enough that they Levi decides to traverse across to see her disaster strikes and he falls in, sending them both on a quest for the truth behind what’s at the bottom of the gorge and a way out.
In its best moments, most of the first half – which is absolutely charming – The Gorge reminded me of early Skydance/J.J. Abrams work. Super 8, Joy Ride, Cloverfield, the first Star Trek. It was sci-fi and fantastical but also built on solid filmmaking, movie homages and character work. The budding, wordless relationship that grows between two soldiers in Levi and Drasa is the most satisfying part of The Gorge and it’s handled beautifully by Teller and Taylor-Joy. Ultimately this is a movie that doesn’t nourish that but then uses it as a stake token and side-steps into a plot that is both more complicated and more of a trope than the leisurely-paced set-up indicates.
There are creatures in the gorge and they come crawling up every now and then forcing our two snipers to use sniper rifles, mini-guns and hanging bombs to repel them down. I dig it and I think this movie could have coasted to a creative finish on that alone, with maybe a climactic fight on the side wall of the gorge. But that’s not what director Scott Derrickson (of grittier horror movies like Sinister and The Black Phone) and writer Zach Dean (The Tomorrow War) have up their sleeve. This is a sci-fi movie with capital letters. Once our heroes fall in the gorge, the movie falls off a cliff.
In terms of pacing, logic, story, the 2nd half of The Gorge is a grab bag of action and sci-fi cliches. Tree mutants on horseback, poison green fog and WWII conspiracies to give the film a sense of weight. Sigourney Weaver shows up in the advisory role she’s been in since The Cabin in the Woods and Paul. The bureauracrat that puts government secrets over lives and involves a day or 2 tops to shoot. The ultimate secret revealed in the gorge is a stock cliche pulled right off the shelf of cliches. The movie isn’t saying anything or revealing anything inventive, it’s just randomly picking from an automat of existing inoffensive ideas. Anything could have been bolted on here and it wouldn’t have changed the outcome. “Let’s do that”. But what if it did? What if it did matter?
I would have resisted the urge to venture into the gorge. I would have wanted it to be kept, not just a secret in the story, but a fable in the eyes of the characters. Maybe it is the gateway to another dimension? or to hell itself? I would have kept the action suspended over the gorge with a white-knuckle grip because falling in would be instant death. Ultimately, what’s in there doesn’t really matter. it’s a physical representation of something that is keeping our two leads apart. Keeping that would have kept the tension higher both between the monsters and our heroes.