The Gorge is a wildly silly action-sci-fi-horror-romance, released on Apple TV+ on Valentine’s Day to alert you to the way it stresses the “unusual love story” angle. Maintaining a conventionally brooding atmosphere through gloomy CGI, The Gorge is about two top snipers stationed in towers on opposite sides of a sinister chasm in a remote forested location. Both are assigned to keep whatever’s in there from getting out.
Since one sniper is played by beautiful Anya Taylor-Joy (Furiosa, The Witch) and the other is played by handsome Miles Teller (Top Gun: Maverick, Whiplash), it’s obvious that somehow the gorge will have to be spanned so the two can get together. And whatever’s actually inside the gorge will have to be confronted.
On top of that, a tough and sinister “top spook” type (Sigourney Weaver) who gives the male sniper this strange assignment is half-obscured by a shadow during the entire scene. So that means there’s an evil and secretive plot run by the NSA or the CIA or some nasty global corporate entity that’s centered on the gorge, and that will have to be confronted too.
Okay then!
This cold war is ongoing as the ex-military sniper representing America, Levi (Teller), faces off opposite the covert op mercenary representing Russia, Drasa (Taylor-Joy). Actually, she’s Lithuanian, but her dying father was a KBG agent who taught her how to compartmentalize her dreadful acts because dwelling on them “makes the heart sad and the brain mad.”
In contemporary terms, it seems at first as if the film will probably be an allegory of the ever-growing impossibility of connecting with our fellow human beings, romantically or otherwise, in an increasingly dehumanized world. I mean, there they are eyeing each other through telescopic lenses at a considerable distance, armed to the teeth and separated by a literal abyss. And on top of all that, shadowy authorities have forbidden them to make contact with each other.
But…
Auteur: Eileen Jones
