Thoughts: The Gorge
This film was infuriating to watch and had me questioning every motive of every character in what would otherwise be a cool movie. The premise is quite simple: a single guard operated outpost stands on either side of a gorge and our main characters have to stop what’s in the gorge from coming out. In what should have been a straightforward mission, it gets turned sideways into a nonsensical sci-fi film to terrible results.
Our main characters, played by Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy, are both expert marksmen who are recruited to stand watch over the gorge at their respective outpost by a private corporation under the facade of a government contract. Right from the start, we don’t get any more information (other than they are both good shots) that would make us want to see them succeed in this mission. The concept is as bare bones as you could make it with no further details provided until we get to the aforementioned gorge, where the rest of the movie takes place. The most obvious mistakes cascade from here with one bad decision after another until they’re both traversing the inside of the gorge, uncovering the full mystery behind their undisclosed, nondescript location.
Upon entering the gorge, the film takes on a new dynamic, akin to that of Annihilation, where heavy sci-fi elements round out this insane concept. The ghoulish hellscape is at least bathed in different colors to give some semblance of ventured depth into the gorge, but only so everything is not the same matted grey, apocalyptic setting that it probably started out as. In a very bland turn of events, the gorge is revealed to be a WWII scientific experiment location gone wrong, which must now be guarded against the undead soldiers who remained.
The Gorge is an uninspiring movie that’s filled with plenty of cliches that refuses to pick a direction which results in a splattering of chaotic genres being mashed together. Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy show no chemistry on screen, with neither character being supplemented enough to cheer for their survival. If you’re going to watch this on Apple TV+, there’s other films and shows on the platform that would better suit your time.