The Gorge film-authority.com

Apple pride themselves on being different from the other tech companies, but when the opportunity arrived to witness Musk’s Nazi salute at his presidential inauguration, Tim Cook’s only question was how much could he donate to the cause to get into that room. You’re either down with such a big gesture or you’re not, and Cook chose their extreme political ally in a heartbeat; we’ll see how well Apple hitching their wagon to unelected POTUS Musk works for them in the long term. In the meantime, there’s nonsense business for a CEO to do; Apple are still pretending to make quality films with top talent, then quietly dumping the mutated results on their Apple TV+ streaming channel, blowing over $20 billion on a variety of shows that have so far won them barely 0.2 % of the viewing audience. Apple’s latest straight to landfill exercise is sci-fi romance hybrid The Gorge, an expensive star vehicle for Anya Taylor-Joy and Miles Teller which is probably better than it needs to be but still isn’t good enough to actually release to cinemas.

Compared to dreck like Amazon’s recent, thematically similar Elevation, The Gorge offers genuine, well-worked characters and is at least mildly original. A dubious recruiter Bartholomew (Sigourney Weaver) hires Jackal-level sniper Levi (Teller) for a strange, deeply clandestine gig; she calls him a ‘mercenary’ but he prefers ‘private contractor’ and that distinction makes more sense when we discover exactly what murky black-ops stuff Levi has been hired to do. He’s parachuted to a secret location to spend a year living in a concrete tower, sans any communication, with orders to shoot everything and anything that emerges from a deep, mist-filled gorge. We see the previous incumbent JD (Sope Dirisu) being abruptly bumped off when he completes his shift, so we know Levi has been hired for his expendability. A sensitive soul, Levi starts writing poetry to amuse himself, but gets understandably distracted when he discovers that foxy Lithuania sniper Drasa (Anya Taylor-Joy) is doing the same job on the other side. After some Love Actually-style whiteboard communications, Levi zip-lines his way over for some canoodling, but when the cable breaks on the way back, brave Drasa dives into the gorge to save Levi, and the two lovers have to fight their way out of hell against an army of…

…The Gorge probably should be allowed to retain a certain mystery, since the detailed emotional hook of the build-up is probably the best bit, and Scott Derrickson’s film works better as a romance-with-monsters than straight up sci-fi. We’re told that Levi and Drava are guarding the ‘door to hell’, but it’s more like the kind of genetically mutated world featured in Alex Garland’s Annihilation, and at least that means some trippy visuals as various giant Groots and skull-spiders swarm our protagonists like a video game set to crushingly hard. The tech-talk and the gloopy kills are well enough done, but somehow the splattery mayhem is a let down after Taylor-Joy and Teller did just a remarkable job of making something more interesting than the norm of their characters.

There’s a neat little montage of getting-to-know you moments between Levi and Drasa in which we see them bridging the yawning metaphorical gap between them by sharing activities such as playing chess and drumming; moments like this lean into our previous history of the stars from The Queen’s Gambit and Whiplash respectively, and that familiarity increases our identification. The notion that the contents of the gorge are just another corporate experimentation aligns neatly with the way the big tech treat their loyal customers; a rep from YouTube once told me that ‘if you aren’t paying for something, you are the product that is being sold’. The idea of the world as one big experimentation camp in which unwitting human beings are there to be poked and prodded by their ‘owners’ would have pleased the likes of Josef Mengele; crystalizing such sentiment into such entertaining yet throwaway fluff like The Gorge doesn’t do anything to absolve Apple from their guilt about dropping their apolitical stance to facilitate the current decline and fall of western civilisation, from The Gorge to the Gulf of Mexico and back.