The Gorge is empty – Washington Examiner
**Summary of “The Gorge” review**
“The Gorge,” an Apple TV+ release, has polarized audiences with its diverging quality throughout. The film starts strong, featuring a captivating first hour led by talented actors Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy, who portray unlikely close-range adversaries turned allies amidst tension with their respective nations. Teller plays Levi Kane, a retired U.S. Marine sniper,while Taylor-Joy’s character,Drasa,is a skilled Russian marksman. Their playful exchanges across a treacherous gorge make for enjoyable viewing, showcasing their chemistry.
Though, the film falters dramatically in the second half, which deviates into poorly executed storytelling, amateurish production choices, and a loss of the engaging tone established earlier. Critiques highlight that pacing issues and a lack of coherent direction result in a lackluster narrative that detracts from the initial promise. The film appears to waste its ample budget,leading to a disjointed experience that leaves viewers unsatisfied by its climax. Despite its strong start, the film ultimately collapses under the weight of its own ambition, creating a mix of commendable and disappointing cinematic elements.
The Gorge is empty
Like a lovers’ quarrel, Apple TV+’s Valentine’s Day release, The Gorge, is likely to split audiences into two mutually uncomprehending camps. For some, a hugely entertaining first hour will prove worth the price of admission, never mind the film’s outright disaster of a second half. Others, not without justice, will skip the climax and denouement altogether, so obviously and suddenly does the production betray its early triumphs. Who’s right? Everyone. Come for the opening act’s star power and style. Stay (or don’t) for one of the worst stretches of moviemaking viewers are liable to see this year.
The picture stars Miles Teller as Levi Kane, a world-class sniper at loose ends following his retirement from the U.S. Marines. Directionless and dour, Levi snaps to attention when a “high-level spook” (Sigourney Weaver) offers a solo mission guarding an observation post in terra incognita. Beside Levi’s tower lies a miles-long crevasse, shrouded in fog and studded with mines. On the other side sits a Russian counterpart. Is fraternization permitted? Sorry, children, that’s a hard nyet.
Moscow’s representative is played by Anya Taylor-Joy, The Queen’s Gambit star who is — one struggles to decide — either lamentably homely or the most beautiful woman in the world. A markswoman every bit as skilled as Levi, Taylor-Joy’s Drasa has no intention of refraining from cross-gorge communication. Before our hero can so much as unfreeze a steak, Drasa is writing him messages to be read by rifle scope. Soon, the pair are playing long-distance chess, air drumming, and taking competitive potshots at one another’s dishware. It isn’t my idea of a steamy flirtation, but, hey, not everyone can trade tasting notes on the 1947 Cheval Blanc.
The 40 minutes that follow the duo’s first contact are as delightful as action-romance filmmaking gets. Hardened but mellowed since his breakout role in 2014’s Whiplash, Teller retains the everyman watchability that made John Cusack a star once upon a time. Taylor-Joy, by contrast, is all firecracker energy and exoticism, a singular screen presence for whom one struggles to name a predecessor of note. (Shelley Duvall?) It will be interesting to follow the 28-year-old’s career as she ages out of ingenue consideration and begins living by her actorly wits. For now, however, the young performer is utterly magnetic. Is it any wonder that, a mere hour into the picture, Levi jury-rigs a zipline and scoots over to the gorge’s other side?
From a short-term storytelling perspective, Levi’s timing provides a terrific jolt. One can almost hear the home audience thinking, He’s going already? In every other way, alas, the decision to send our protagonist across so soon is a critical error. Had the movie paced itself, granting viewers perhaps 20 minutes of engineering hijinks, the narrative could have stayed where it belonged: on the surface, in the company of two interesting and likable leads. Instead, Levi channels his inner MacGyver and spans the gap in a single go. With 60 minutes of run time remaining, the film has no choice but to slink into the abyss to die.
How to count the offenses against good moviemaking that follow? The production’s tone, previously lighter than air, drops with a splat to the gorge’s marshy ground. Nods to previous films, among them Peter Jackson’s King Kong (2005) and Alex Garland’s Annihilation (2018), come off as plain theft rather than respectful allusion. Perhaps least forgivably, the movie’s journey into the fog is so amateurish and cheaply shot that one wonders where the film’s reported $70 million budget went. One imagines an Apple executive bursting into postproduction on the evening of Feb. 13. “We’re streaming this baby tomorrow, dammit. Just give me what you’ve got.”
WHAT IS DOGE? WHAT TO KNOW ABOUT THE DEPARTMENT OF GOVERNMENT EFFICIENCY
What actually happens in the gorge is hardly worth spoiling. No “doorway to hell,” contra a minor character’s speculation, the abyss is the site of a biological weapons program gone horribly wrong. Genetic research that might have rivaled the Manhattan Project has instead produced monsters more than a little reminiscent of the tree-like Groot character in Guardians of the Galaxy (2014). Pursued by these “hollow men,” Levi and Drasa sprint through badly framed hellscapes, pausing only long enough to misinterpret a famous T.S. Eliot poem. When, in a grimly hilarious moment, the pair stumble upon a working computer, it gives up its secrets within seconds. Don’t you just love it when the bad guys leave the relevant Word document open on the desktop?
It will surprise no one to learn that the military-industrial complex, that old bugbear, is to blame for everything. Sure enough, Weaver and company show up on cue, guns blazing, to forestall what is certain to be one heck of a DOGE budget cut. Whether our heroes survive, I will refrain from saying. But I promise you won’t care by the end. A hybrid creation, The Gorge is a rather good movie spliced into a shockingly bad one. And it’s heading right for us. Better run.
Graham Hillard is editor at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal and a Washington Examiner magazine contributing writer.
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