The Gorge- Somehow not A.I.
The Gorge pushes the boundaries of how derivative you can get.
I’m very late in writing this review and it is quite possible many people have already forgotten that Apple TV+’s blockbuster action / romance / horror hybrid came out this year… but not me! Seriously though, it is amazing how a massive film released just a few months ago featuring two big stars (arguably only one - I love Miles Teller but can’t tell if he is a “star” or not) that managed to clinch the record for Apple’s biggest film launch to date is essentially already out of the cultural conversation. The simple answer is because it is just not a very good movie, but the true depth of The Gorge’s failure is quite perplexing, making for frankly a hell of a roller coaster ride, specifically one of the ones that messes your neck up for the rest of the day.
The Gorge is directed by Scott Derrickson, who has been steadily making a name for himself as a serviceable studio horror director. His resume is spotty but it has a few highlights like 2021’s The Black Phone that demonstrate a true passion for the genre. With The Gorge, Derrickson certainly leans into his horror roots with the titular gorge acting as a home for hellish monsters and Zdzisław Beksiński inspired environments, however these elements are actually pretty few and far between given that they are supposed to be central to the whole conflict of the film. There’s no way to describe it other than that the film has been four-quadrant-ed into oblivion. The Gorge follows the two most elite snipers in the world, played by Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy, as they start a year long detail overlooking separate sides of a massive gorge filled with evil monsters. They have no contact with the outside world other than a shadowy organization who refuses to give them any information about their mission. Eventually the two fall both in love and into the gorge, trapping themselves in a brutal fight for their life as the secrets of the gorge are revealed. (As a side note, immediately upon finishing the film, the word gorge no longer sounds real.)
From that description you may be expecting a taught horror thriller with a central romance tying up the emotional core of the story and on paper that is true. In actuality though the film rotates through several genres at rapid speeds oscillating between YA dystopia, Cold War spy thriller, cartoony MCU action flick, and Netflix-style cheesy romance. It is functionally a mashup of every major box office trend from the 2010s that steals from so much that the individual pieces start to lose sense. For example, the film spends over half of its runtime laboriously setting up how good of snipers the two leads are. They flirt through sniping, they chat about their greatest sniping hits, they were hired to guard the gorge because of their sniping prowess, etc. With all this effort you would think that it would factor into the action or tension later on, especially once they get stuck in the gorge. If Call of Duty taught me anything, it’s that sniping has a lot to do with stealth, so maybe they will be forced to put their stealth skills to the test to sneak around the monsters; that or the monsters need precise shots to die, putting their accuracy at the forefront. It doesn’t matter though, apparently they are equally good at close combat and the primary action against the creatures of the gorge consists of straight forward action shootouts (and a sword fight, for some reason).
There are examples of orphaned ideas like this all throughout the film. I mentioned earlier that the art direction of the gorge takes heavy inspiration from the Polish surrealist Zdzisław Beksiński who painted some of the most visceral depictions of hell inspired by the trauma of living through the holocaust. It is very heavy and impactful stuff that is treated by the filmmaking team in the same manner Midjourney or DALL-E would: as aesthetic content to superficially rip from. It could have been excused if the plot motivation was really interesting, but the best screenwriter Zach Dean could seemingly come up with is some vague backstory about a science experiment gone wrong and in cliche fashion is also the secret to creating super soldiers. The Gorge is frightening in the way it blatantly rips off everything around it without even understanding why they are ripping something off in the first place. It feels like a true AI script, one that has gotten past the initial phases of writing something competent and is at the point where it can endlessly remix plot points, characters and genres to an infinite degree. It really feels like the film SHOULD be fun while watching it. Like you’ve seen all of this work before and can’t figure out why it just feels utterly wrong.
Somehow though the film is not AI, which is even more shocking. Even the Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross score sounds fake, like they are just passively approximating something they would do. It is a testament to the true lack of vision plaguing the project. Teller and Taylor-Joy are good but they have next to nothing to work with, playing stock action movie cutouts of the “serious straight edge military man” and “goth manic pixie dream girl.” You would think steaming’s ability to successfully rally fandoms around specific content niches would theoretically create an environment where that niche content could thrive and experiment, knowing that it would algorithmically be put in front of the audience that would enjoy it the most. In another world maybe The Gorge, free of theatrical expectation, would have been able to be a smaller more targeted horror thriller instead of a four quadrant mess attempting to mix Divergent with Event Horizon and Act of Valor. Streamers like Shudder are making an effort in this regard, but on a large scale, original streaming content has devolved into gorge-like homogeneity.
2/10- Terrible