The Gorge

The Gorge a is buy one-get-two-free kind of movie – there’s romance, there’s horror and there’s action. Not all of it works out, but there is one part that does work really well.

The Gorge follows two military personel, one from the West and one from the East. Each have been chosen to man two outposts, one on either side of a gorge for 365 days. On the West side is Levi (Miles Teller) and on the East side is Drasa (Anya Taylor-Joy). They face each other across a large gorge whose valley is hidden by a constant fog. They have been instructed not to communicate with each other. What’s in the gorge is unknown to each, but the gorge is well guarded and hidden from satellites. No one except the people that chose these two know where the gorge is.

The first half of the movie is the stronger part of the movie, it is quiet and follows Levi and Drasa as they develop a relationship from afar. Teller and Joy have good on screen chemistry – and this makes this first hour of the movie work very well. I enjoyed it a lot. It’s really fun watching two snipers meet cute and develop a relationship that includes pistols and long rifles.

Unfortuately, the movie falls into a more standard-fare shooty shooty action/horror movie in the second half. It also reveals too much about the central mystery of the movie – the gorge itself. There are times when leaving a mystery as a mystery is a good thing – or at least not show so much.

The songs that were chosen for the movie are rather awesome. The score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross is not very memorable and felt a bit generic.

Miles Teller looks a lot like a young Richard Gere in some scense.

In the end, the movie is an entertaining way to spend two hours. It could have worked better if it was a bit shorter by cutting some of the action parts of the movie. The development of the relationship between Levi and Drasa makes The Gorge worth watching.

Streamed on Apple TV+.