Illustration by Michael DiMilo
★★★1/2
Long-Distance Relationship: Film Review of The Gorge
By Geoff Carter
Genre movies have come (or gone) a long way. It used to be that a spy movie was just a spy movie. We could always trust James Bond to be suave, sophisticated, and deadly—and his movies to be fun romps. Romcoms used to just as predictable. Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, yada yada yada…. And now we live in the age of superhero remakes and redos and reimaginings and regurgitations. How many iterations of Spiderman have we seen?
To their credit, some Marvel products like Thor: Ragnarök or Guardians of the Galaxy display a refreshingly sharp wit—as opposed to the predictable, even dreary, humor of the Avengers epics—but the bulk of the Marvel films are eminently predictable. They seem to have been churned out at the same superfactory.
Superhero flicks aside, the boundaries of genre films have become blurred—porous. Characteristics of one bleed into another. The Substance, for example, is a brilliantly conceived movie with elements of sci-fi, biddy horror, satire, and feminist thematics.
More recently, and much less brilliantly, Apple released The Gorge, a sort of rom-com spy horror sci-fi political thriller (with lots of guns and explosions), on streaming TV. The movie features the premise of two high-echelon (boy and girl) assassins to guard the borders of a mysterious and deadly gorge. To be honest, I was expecting a typical shoot-em-up zombie monster type of entertainment (and it is all that), but I was pleasantly surprised. This mash-up of studio leftovers somehow came together as a very nice casserole (or hot dish) of fun.
At the beginning of the film, Darsa (the captivating Anya Taylor-Joy), is lying in wait in for her target. She is living in a tiny jungle cave near a small airport. When a private jet arrives, she makes the identification, sights the target, and shoots him from approximately 3000 meters away.
We cut to Levi (Miles Teller), who has been summoned to the office of a high-ranking anonymous official (Sigourney Weaver) to go on a mission. She explains he is to guard the west side of a monstrous gorge in an undisclosed location for a year. He is to have no contact with the outside world—which is fine with him.
Darsa is assigned to guard the east side of the ravine. The stations are identical and within sight of each other. The edge of the gorge is lined with mines, netting, barbed wire, and cloaking devices to mask its existence from the outside world. The two guardians are forbidden to interact with each other or to enter the gorge. Several times, creatures from the gorge scale the walls but are beaten back by Levi and Darsa.
The two mercenaries go about their jobs and sometimes catch sight of each other. Darsa starts watching Levi and eventually starts to communicate with him. They become friendly and the attraction between them is obvious. Levi enjoys Darsa’s spunkiness and her fondness for The Ramones and dancing, and she seems to like his sense of humor. Levi decides to drop in. He shoots a wire across the gorge, creating a zipline, and crosses over the gorge.
The two meet, have a nice supper, dance, and let nature take its course. While crossing back to his own guard station, the zipline breaks and Levi is cast into the gorge. Without hesitation, Darsa parachutes in after him.
The two are attacked by strangely mutated creatures that look somewhat like malignant Ents from The Lord of the Rings movies. What they are where they come from is revealed as the two wade their way through a plethora of gory battle scenes. (Thank God they seem to have a never-ending ammo supply). When the secret of the gorge is revealed, the two manage to make their escape and save humanity in the bargain. We can only hope for a happy ending for the lovers.
The Gorge could have, and probably should have been a Hollywood boilerplate film. A long-distance romance—sort of a You’ve Got Mail situation, a shoot-em-up, a political thriller with a military-industrial-corporate-type villain, some cold-war politics, monster zombie freaks from hell, and then a possible world-wide epidemic. Whew.
What holds all this together is good direction, a decent screenplay, and the lead actors. Anya Taylor-Joy in particular is simply stunning. Her Darsa is a combination of murderous efficiency, keen wit, incisive intelligence, and sorority girl type of mischievousness. She can drop a Russian oligarch at 3000 yards but will dance crazily to a Ramones song on the stereo and chop up a gorge monster without blinking. She is a professional, a romantic, and alone. In a lesser actor’s hands, Darsa might have seen too cutesy or too dark or too damaged, but Taylor-Joy overlays the character with ajoie du vivre that jumps off the screen. It’s hard not to like Darsa, even when she’s shooting up the joint.
Teller’s Levi is less of a revelation. He is also a mercenary, intelligent, and alone. He does not possess Darsa’s charisma, but there is sort of likability that slowly emerges from behind his tough-guy façade. He is amused and charmed by Darsa’s notes as he watches her through his binoculars. The voyeuristic basis of their long-distance relationship is charming by itself.
The Gorge is an action movie, and to me, like so many other movies out there, the action is overdone. For some reason (probably teenager focus groups), filmmakers feel that a film narrative has to be punctuated with explosions and automatic weapons fire every two minutes. The most egregious example of this is the six-minute fight scene when Bilbo and the dwarves are barrel-riding in The Hobbit. There is simply no need for a battle scene here. The story doesn’t need it. To me, at least, it interrupted the rhythm and flow of the film.
But I digress. It’s interesting to note that Scott Derrickson, who directed The Gorge, and screenwriter Zach Dean, who wrote it, are veterans of the superhero and horror genres. Derrickson helmed The Exorcism of Emily Rose and Doctor Strange while Dean authored Deadfall and The Tomorrow War. Their familiarity and expertise with studio genres have served them well, allowing them to transcend those respective genres and craft a smart film that is entertaining, amusing, and charming on any number of levels.
The Gorge is not a profound or a revelatory movie, but it is, like a good piece of pastry, enjoyable and tasty. A guilty pleasure. If for no other reason, see it to experience Taylor-Joy’s performance. She steals every frame she is in.
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