Director: Scott Derrickson
Stars: Anya Taylor-Joy, Sope Dirisu, Miles Teller
From March 1997 to May 2003, Buffy Summers protected the world from the hellmouth with only a wooden stake, a library card, and a handful of friends. Guarding the gates of hell has evidently become more sophisticated since then, at least as Scott Derrickson’s genre-bending new thriller The Gorge sees it. Former marine now mercenary Levi (Miles Teller) is drafted in by Sigourney Weaver’s spook to take watch over the titular ravine. In his brief from jovial predecessor JD (Sope Dirisu) he’s given a tour of the various gun turrets and drones all targeting the misty crevice, informed of cloaking technology used to keep their location a secret from spy satellites and Google Maps, and told a mildly spooky tale of ‘the hollow men’ who dwell below, whom Levi is tasked with supressing. There’s a lot of tech and firepower at his disposal. But no back-up.
On the ‘Soviet’ side of the border, however, is his Eastern counterpart, Drasa (Anya Taylor-Joy), another expert sniper and avowed Ramones fan. While the two are forbidden from communicating, this doesn’t make particularly entertaining sentry work for Drasa. On her birthday she reaches out to Levi, and a cute pen-pal relationship is sparked. They play chess, make snowmen at Christmas, build makeshift drumkits (two wry winks at prior hits for both players)… and occasionally reign bullets down on the Ent-like humanoids who occasionally try to claw their way to the surface. All from a distance of several hundred feet.
While a stern opening, brutalist architecture and its overall po-faced demeanour would suggest a no-nonsense actioner, it’s no coincidence that The Gorge has dropped on Apple TV on Valentine’s Day. Derrickson’s picture has a particularly soppy heart. Loneliness and solitude can eat away at a person. But Levi is a man of discipline. Looking at Anya Taylor-Joy through a set of binoculars once a day, however, is obviously enough to make one man horny and foolish beyond all reason. That urge seems to work both ways.
While The Gorge remains topside it at least plays like an intriguingly displaced romantic comedy, the gulf between its subjects a lumpen metaphor. Levi’s grand gesture to cross it is as earnest as Drasa’s surprising (disappointing?) urge to play house and act subservient to her man. When we ultimately descend, however, Derrickson’s brief Marvel tenure is brought back to mind. The Gorge gets lost in a murk of CGI monsters. There’s an overfamiliarity to the things lurking in the depths below. Perhaps evidence that the demons of our nightmares share a certain putrescence. Collective fears. Yet we’ve seen them this glossy too many times before. It feels as though we’ve been dropped into one of any number of shoot ’em up horror video games from the last 20 years. A derivative mash-up of The Last of Us and Resident Evil with some handy exposition that presents all of this as an airheaded Annihilation. It’s as silly as the first half, but in a less engaging manner.
Zach Dean’s screenplay is cluttered with howlers (“you bury enough secrets, the graveyard runs out of room”), while also getting pretty liberal with its highfalutin poetic reference points, a bid at appearing far loftier than it plays. Quoting TS Elliot when you’ve just fended off a CGI zombie horseman doesn’t quite earn you credibility, in fact it’s liable to strike points off. There’s also, lamentably, something of an imbalance between Taylor-Joy and Teller. The former seems capable of putting the effort in no matter the project. The latter seems unsure whether the Top Gun: Maverick shoot is over. Whether that’s Teller’s choice or Derrickson’s, Levi is a fairly anonymous entity.
We’d have had effectively no story if Levi weren’t out-of-his-mind horny, but there’s an argument to be made that The Gorge is ultimately against diversity in the military, that it plays out a batshit cautionary tale about fraternisation between soldiers. That you’ll wind-up tortured by Treebeard and its basically your own fault. It isn’t the only backsliding suggestion in what turns out to be quite the throwback to the atomic horrors of the ’50s. Derrickson’s film has a whole lot more money behind it, but you can draw a reasonably straight line from it to drive-in movies like The Black Scorpion or Beginning of the End.
Whenever Derrickson attempts to give his flick the guts and vulgarity of a Paul W.S. Anderson joint (see one particular vertical escape sequence), things come closer to the mark, but the mish-mash of genres and styles doesn’t quite coalesce. So he’s unable to get away with the numerous bafflingly annoying plot-holes that The Gorge blithely fails to address. That kind of thing doesn’t usually bother me. Maybe if the rest of the picture felt stronger – or tighter – they wouldn’t linger so gallingly. It’s a reasonable enough time with your brain off, but isn’t that always the faint praise given when something isn’t working hard enough?
At least Buffy Summers is coming back to show ’em how it should be done.
The Lost Highway Hotel 