Review: The Gorge crumbles around Anya Taylor-Joy and Miles Teller, but it s a tactical crumble

Get the Full StoryThere are few more baffling modern mysteries than that of Apple TV Plus marketing strategy, which seems to follow a mandate of perpetual chaos and a gleeful disregard for optics. It was one thing, for instance, for Apple TV Plus to hardly market The Gorge, but it was quite another to haphazardly push the film from a Feb. 28 release date to a Feb. 14 release date, forcing it into some unnecessary, last-minute media contention with Captain America: Brave New World, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, and Paddington in Peru. The first conclusion one might reach here is that Apple TV Plus knew they had a stinker on their hands and hatched a plan to bury it. The only snag in that plan? Well, The Gorge is actually quite good, and owes most all of its merits to director Scott Derrickson, who takes Zach Dean s unkempt-but-compelling script and orchestrates it with an impressively subversive prowess. The sincerity with which Anya Taylor-Joy and Miles Teller approach the material can t be counted out either, despite the considerable asterisk hanging above their heads. The Gorge stars Teller and Taylor-Joy as Levi and Drasa, two snipers who are assigned to keep watch over a mysterious gorge ! that appears to house none too few beasts from hell. Stationed in two separate towers on opposite sides of the chasm, the pair are forbidden to have any contact, so, of course, they promptly break that protocol and get to know each other, all while secrets most hideous linger just a few feet away. It s difficult to tell where Dean s screenplay ends and Derrickson s direction begins, but from within that jumble of collaboration emerges a certain storytelling know-how that elevates The Gorge above the line at which it otherwise would have stopped. It begins to take shape about 20 minutes into the film, when Levi and Drasa have finished settling in to their respective stations and are officially on the job. As they sweetly make each other s acquaintance with whiteboard messages and high-powered binoculars, Levi reckons with his PTSD and noodles in his poetry book while Drasa plays her piano, celebrates her birthday, and mourns her father. These quiet, wordless moments are infinitely more effective than the 20 minutes of pre-mission exposition that we re greeted with at the outset. Levi s credentials and Drasa s father telling her he s probably going to kill himself do not help to meaningfully establish these characters, whereas watching them simply exist in a space on their own replete with a lack of recognizable social pressures conveys these characters quite nutritiously especially in the specific context of The Gorge; more on that in a minute . The camera knows this, as it seems severely disinterested in the film whenever it s subjecting us to infodumps or in-world, logistical connective tissue the drop in, the walk through the forest to the tower, those aforementioned 20 minutes, what have you . The camera jumps, cuts, and meanders lethargically, as though it knows that none of this is what actually matters. What matters, of course, is the connection that Levi and Drasa share. Pleasantries turn into expressions of vulnerability, which eventually turn into a face-to-face meeting that carries a considerable amount of risk to pull off. Within that meeting, the pair nerd out over sniper rifles in a way that only they could with each other, and offer up more vulnerabilities in a way they simply couldn t over text text, in this case, meaning whiteboard . This all makes for a genuinely beautiful portrait of two human beings making a concerted effort to really know one another, all while the literal gate to hell hangs just inches away from them. They make art, they play, they wonder about what s really in the gorge, and then brush that off to rightfully focus on their shared humanity once again. Then their idyll is shattered when the monsters manage their deadliest attack yet, and they re forced to reckon with what s really going on with the gorge. Image via Apple TV Plus And like that, we re back to the very same infodumps that the camera hurried us through earlier this time involving lore behind the world, the monsters, and the conspiracy afoot because of course there s a conspiracy afoot . But, just as before, the camera does not care about these things. It chops through the action set pieces and zombie-walks around the exposition, because it like us audiences and these two characters wants to get back to what really matters; the human element and love that comes alive between Levi and Drasa. To Dean s credit, the genre elements aren t complete empty calories. The monster designs quite obviously aim to highlight the significance of being human, and there s something similarly compelling about Levi and Drasa now needing to rely on one another to literally survive. Still, everyone on set knew that the meat of The Gorge comes from the pair s connection, whether it s the camera s muted urgency to get back to these two, or Teller s and Taylor-Joy s honest commitment to the whole two hours. Indeed, even when the camera clues us in to how little this massive government conspiracy matters in the wake of two people choosing to love each other, Teller and Taylor-Joy dial in without any such breaks. The playfulness of Drasa and anxiety of Levi are worn expertly by the pair, and they both make the most of their strategically sparse bursts of pathos. And yet, the best version of The Gorge is likely lost to us on account of the presence of these two actors, because no studio in the world would allow anyone to put these two together on screen without a dollop of romance. Indeed, human connection emerges as the key motivator for these two either way, but one can t help but wonder, for instance, if Levi s willingness to connect wasn t significantly motivated by the fact that he is a young man, and Drasa looks a lot like Anya Taylor-Joy. Or that Drasa is a young woman, and Levi looks a lot like Miles Teller. Image via Apple TV Plus Would it not be more compelling if that element of sexual attraction was taken out of the equation? What if the snipers were two straight men? Two straight women? Levi and his new lesbian BFF? What if these two only stood to benefit from sharing each other s minds and souls, while the bodily benefit stopped at a hug? How would that impact the nuances of connecting with each other in a world where we seemingly have to work overtime to do so? If you re at the gates of hell, how far do you go to love someone solely for the fact of their humanity? How far do you go to emotionally so, in essence, literally survive? Regrettably, these questions are undermined by the happenstance sex appeal, but we must also recognize that those questions exist in the first place because The Gorge just as it is sets up such an excellent emotional snapshot. The pronounced shallowness of its blockbuster zhuzh brilliantly indicts any and all disregard for human stories and experience, all while its own human story builds itself quite lovingly and poignantly upon the ever-reliable duo of Mister Fantastic and Princess Peach. Indeed, it may have been the stealthiest of stealth releases this side of Donnie Darko, but The Gorge quite firmly lands on the stronger side of Apple TV Plus expanding film library, where it will hopefully garner the attention it deserves.

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