It's probably never a good idea to review a film that you haven't finished watching - I split my viewing of "The Gorge", directed by Scott Derrickson ("Dr Strange") and available on Apple TV+ over 2 days so far and have the last third to go - the question is, can I stay the course?
Perhaps it's a sign of age combined with post-cardiac issues but I find these kinds of cortisol inducing action films hard to watch nowadays, perhaps even at all, so much so that they would drive me to seek out the nearest available film by Eric Rohmer or other slower paced films of an earlier pre-video game era.
And this, for me, is the problem with the film and also the surprise that it was directed by Derrickson, whose oeuvre has been confined to supernatural horror, a genre I'm not particularly interested in and underpinned by his personal Catholic religious beliefs and an obsession with the occult - this clearly made him a good choice for Marvel's "Dr Strange", a film I enjoyed as a fan of Steve Ditko's comic creation and probably the best comic to film in the MCU that I've seen, and I'm not especially a fan of the MCU films.
The fact that he was removed from directing the much anticipated sequel to "Dr Strange" to be replaced by Sam Raimi might suggest that he wanted to push the character further into the dark world of occult horror and his particular world view, but that's just a guess on my part.
"The Gorge" starts off promisingly with an interesting premise of two highly trained military operatives, played respectively by Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy ("The Queens Gambit") stationed either side of a vast gorge in tall concrete fortresses and representing East and West politically.
The gorge hides a dark secret hinted at by the outgoing operative of Teller's side, who describes it as the gateway to hell, hidden from view by a dense layer of fog and of course it is only a matter of time before they and we discover what that horror is.
I found the first third of the film interesting in as much as it is about the politically forbidden burgeoning romance between the two main protagonists, separated by the gorge and therefore unable to develop it beyond watching each other's day to day activities through high powered binoculars - in the hands of an Andrei Tarkovsky, this would have sufficed as a metaphor for the human condition and how politics can divide people. But this film has no such pretensions and before long the horror is revealed as being mutated human zombies, part human and part plant, that scale the sheer walls of the gorge to attack the duo who initially successfully fend them off with an assortment of high-powered weapons, both being established early on as crack-shots, and explosive mines placed strategically along the edge of the gorge. A rope strung up between the two sides of the gorge by Teller's "Levi" becomes the means by which he is able to finally meet Taylor-Joy's "Drasa" but when it snaps as he is returning from one his regular romantic assignations with her this precipitates the plot further as he plunges into the gorge below, provoking "Drasa" to leap into the gorge after him with a parachute and weapons. The bottom of the gorge is revealed to be a kind of hell of swirling fog - coloured differently in various scenes - and twisted vegetation and "Levi" finds himself caught in tree branches before he falls to the ground and into the maw of some man-eating plant life. Just in time "Drasa" saves him as she arrives and blasts the abomination with perfectly aimed gun fire. The second the third of the film plays out like a video game - think "Silent Hill" or any number of kill-a-zombie video games - as Levi and Drasa try to find an escape route and in the process uncover the dark truth that has been deliberately hidden from them about the gorge as a shadowy Cold-War project in biological warfare that has gone horribly wrong, producing human/plant/insect mutations of soldiers sent there as subjects for experimentation. At this point I began to lose interest as, like in video games, the two protagonists are able to kill zombies but seem impervious to injury themselves, even when skewered by a tree branch or dragged through undergrowth by a mutated cavalry soldier riding a mutated horse, and neither character seems overly terrified of their predicament or curious as to why - there are lots of scenes of jeopardy but Levi and Drasa manage to extricate themselves with a little struggle and a high kill-count. On arriving at the laboratory that is the centre of the experiments, they conveniently find a can of film and projector that shows a film which reveals the true horror of the gorge, and later a computer console - one of the plot's many inconsistencies given that we are led to believe that the gorge is a relic of the Cold War - that reveals that this is an ongoing project of the shadowy military industrial complex, led by Sigourney Weaver's "Bartholomew", a role she plays with obvious relish even if it's reduced to a mere cameo since it is a clear reference to the subplot of "Alien". The last third is about their escape from the gorge following the discovery that a nuclear device has been placed there to destroy all traces of the biological weapons laboratory and its hideous products and involves winching an army jeep up the sheer walls of the gorge as they fend off yet another zombie attack and by now I was beginning to feel distinctly uncomfortable watching the film so I stopped there...:)
I may pick up where I left off but my guess is that there is a plot twist where it is revealed that both protagonists are super-soldiers, the intended result of the biological weapons lab' before things went awry, which would explain why they both seem impervious to injury, though this aspect of the plot just made it feel more like a regular shoot-em-up video game where only the zombies die - of course I might be wrong and if I am I'll edit this post accordingly. There are some intriguing ideas in the film such as that plant spores could cause mutations in other forms of life but TBH I was expecting something else to be at the bottom of the gorge and the eventual reveal seems particularly banal - perhaps Derrickson is suggesting that heaven and hell aren't abstract concepts about the afterlife but can exist on Earth as made-made things and he never allows the plot to lean into his usual occult/religious territory except for perhaps the deserted church at the bottom of the gorge where the duo are attacked by skull-spiders and more plant zombies - if you're seeking depth, that's about it - heaven above and hell beneath.
To round off I'd say that this is a shoot-em-up for the video game generation, but with some engaging central characters - both Teller and Taylor-Joy are engaging and equally matched - and if you enjoy a cortisol rush, then it's for you - me, I'll stick to something a bit slower paced with less guns...:)
"The Gorge", Dir: Scott Derrickson, 2o25
Apple TV+
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