Intensity: 🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Directed by Scott Derrickson
Written by Zach Dean
The Gorge is the ultimate mash-up film. Science fiction, romance, war, and horror are all bottled into one package. What The Gorge does best is character building. Anya Taylor-Joy and Miles Teller have real star power and great chemistry. The action sequences rock, with outstanding choreography and impressive production values. The monsters, though, are a mixed bag and are window-dressing MacGuffins to the main event, romance.
Scott Derrickson has learned much from his Marvel production days about crafting a multi-layered thrill package for a broad audience. The Gorge takes a simple premise of two people, separated by an impassible expanse, who fall in love. It drives home the metaphor with a literal canyon between the two protagonists and fills that canyon with vengeful mutants. The unsavory profession of sniper assassins breaks these two snipers, but their means to salvation are through each other.
If only they can find a way to cross that divide. (Cue the violins.)
The Cast of The Gorge:
- Anya Talyor-Joy plays Drasa, a Lithuanian sniper who does wet work for the KGB. She is a second-generation assassin who goes nights without sleeping.
- Miles Teller plays Levi, an American mercenary with hundreds of scalps to his credit. He is alone, burdened by his work, and devoid of attachments.
- Sigourney Weaver plays Bartholomew, Levi’s mysterious spook director of operations, who gives Levi this secret mission.
- William Houston plays Erikas, Drasa’s father, who takes on the emotional burden of Drasa’s kills so that she doesn’t have to live with the torment. He is dying of cancer and has planned his own demise for Valentine’s Day, while Drasa is on assignment.
- Sope Dirisu plays JD, a British soldier whose time at the Gorge post has concluded. He must now pass on his knowledge of the shift change to Levi.
A Short Synopsis:
We are introduced to Drasa as she successfully eliminates a Belorussian arms tycoon, establishing her deadly skill. Returning from her assignment, he visits her father at her mother’s grave to hand over the rifle shell denoting a kill. Erikas claims the shell is a symbolic transaction of the burden of guilt for killing another person. The pouch he has is full of her spent shells.
Across the globe, Bartholomew summons Levi to a mission. It is not wetwork, but it will require someone with his deadly sniping skill. His resume is adorned with difficult assignment trophies, and a remote one-year assignment will not be an issue because he isn’t leaving anyone at home who will miss him.
Both Drasa and Levi arrive on opposite sides of a fog-shrouded ravine. JD is glad to see Levi, as his one-year rotation is now over. The guard posts on both sides of the canyon are heavily armed with automated defense systems designed to keep whatever is in that gorge from coming out. JD informs Levi that he believes that they are guarding a portal to hell, and then makes off for his return flight home. Make sure nothing gets out of that gorge, and do not make contact with the tower on the other side.
Drasa gets the same instructions. But while Levi is a more by-the-book soldier and will not easily break the rules, Drasa is a free spirit and breaks protocol. After months of staring at each other, she draws Levi’s attention with handwritten “flashcards.” The two of them get to know each other through written signs and by using their binoculars. When one of their exchanges gets interrupted by the emergence of mutants scaling the cliffs, a massive firefight erupts as the two soldiers pummel the canyon walls with precision fire.
The trust is now solidified, and they become enamored with each other. Levi concocts a means to zipline across to visit the other side of the ravine. Their months of courtship by flashcard culminate with a dinner date of rabbit stew and dancing the night away. When Levi zips back to his side of the watch, something emerges out of the gloom to cut his zipline. His parachute pops open, and he disappears into the fog. Drasa plunges into the canyon after him, and they discover the horrible secrets of the decades-old secret below.
Evaluation of The Gorge:
The most important part of this movie is that the romance works splendidly. The movie pitches itself first and foremost as a love story, told through action and horror moments. The story takes its time to build the chemistry and the camaraderie, and when the two snipers finally meet face to face, it feels earned and natural. There are some lovely comic bits as well.
Scott Derrickson and Zach Dean were gifted with two hugely talented actors in their primes and in perhaps the least consequential but most endearing moment in the movie, they paid tribute to the highlights of their careers. As they court each other across the chasm, they play chess (In a nod to Taylor-Joy’s Emmy nominated Beth Harmon in The Queen’s Gambit) and pound away on make-shift drum kits made of pots and buckets (A nod to Teller’s role in the Oscar-nominated Whiplash). Both performers oozed charisma and were solid with both the romantic and action work.
The action set pieces for The Gorge thrilled me. The aforementioned gorge firefight, the plunge into the canyon, the harrowing climb out of the canyon, and weaving their way through what has to be described as a membrane network of dead soldiers pulsed with comic-book movie bravado.
As entertaining as the movie is, what didn’t work so well was the science-fiction backstory. For a movie that got all the details right about courtship, it struggled to produce a convincing rationale for the mystery in the gorge. It felt like an afterthought, and it overplayed its hand with the supernatural aspects. Once they descended into the gorge, there was an ever-changing color palette. The sharp-eyed snipers should have noticed radically shifting primary color hues in the clouds below. Curious. The post-World War II foundation was littered with logic gaps.
The romance emerges as a just-right medium-rare. The action sequences are spicy. However, the science fiction is undercooked, leaving it a little raw around the edges. It feels as if they reached the end of the writing process and tried to figure out why something was at the bottom of the gorge.
Conclusion
This is a great date night movie. There’s a little bit for everybody. The acting performances are charming, and Anya Taylor Joy continues her ascent past Kate Beckinsale and Mila Jovovich to receive the crown of the best pretty/skinny action heroine on the market. Miles Teller continues his re-emergence as a leading man following the disappointment of the Fantastic 4 flop.
Apple+ knows they have a winner on their hands. It is currently the first big splash page when you open their application. You cannot miss it. This PG-13 movie executes interpersonal storytelling far better than most big-budget blockbusters, but it has the feel of a superhero action film.
To extend my previous food metaphor, The Gorge resembles a bag of Jelly Bellys. It has lots of sweetness and is mostly satisfying, with a few licorice-flavored ones that throw you off a bit but not enough to discourage you from eating more. I think I’m in a post-Valentine’s Day sugar-high come-town. For those of you who want more sweetness in their horror movies, I created a dead list for Horror Romances, and snuck this movie in at the last moment.