The Gorge isn’t that deep, but it sure is fast.
There’s ambition in The Gorge, but not the kind that carefully builds a world – it’s the kind that’s looking to set a new speed record, racing through the story at a breakneck pace, barely stopping to take in the scenery before leaping headlong into the next chapter. Scott Derrickson’s latest is a fast-paced blend of romance, sci-fi, action, and horror that feels less like someone trying to condense an entire YA dystopian book series into a single movie. There’s a sprawling mythology lurking just under the surface, but rather than unearthing it, The Gorge barrels through its revelations like it’s seen what happened to the Divergent series and wants to make sure it gets its entire story on screen in one single two-and-a-half-hour sprint.
Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy lead the charge as Levi Kane and Drasa, two elite soldiers stationed on opposite sides of an ominous, mysterious chasm. He’s by-the-book, she’s the wildcard, and together they make the kind of star-crossed duo that would normally spend three novels discovering their love is forbidden by some overarching totalitarian regime. Instead, The Gorge takes a more direct route – throwing them together in high-stakes, high-concept duty, then plunging them into the depths of the abyss, where they encounter nightmarish creatures, cryptic government secrets, and existential stakes that probably made more sense in the original draft.
Teller and Taylor-Joy do more for the film than the script ever does for them. Their chemistry is effortless, even as the story barrels past moments that should have been given time to blossom. Teller brings just the right mix of charm and stoic frustration, while Taylor-Joy manages to inject warmth into a character who, on paper, feels designed for an edgier, mid-2010s YA adaptation. Sigourney Weaver pops in for some exposition and authority, but her role feels like a relic from an earlier, more patient draft of the film-one where she might have had more to do than vaguely hint at the bigger picture before disappearing then reappearing to bookend the whole thing.
The film looks great, and Derrickson knows how to stage an eerie, visually striking set piece. The gorge itself is a place of unsettling beauty, a vast, unknown expanse where danger lurks in the shadows, waiting for its chance to strike. Its eerie, dreamlike quality and creeping sense of existential dread make it hard not to draw comparisons to Annihilation, especially in the way it treats the unknown as something both awe-inspiring and terrifying. The creature designs are inventive, too, though like much of the film’s ideas, they’re introduced, half-explored, and then quickly discarded in favour of another rapid-fire plot development.
If The Gorge were a book series, we’d be looking at an entire trilogy’s worth of material: book one setting up the mystery and the reluctant partnership, book two diving into the horror of what lurks beneath, and book three wrapping everything up as our heroes bring karmic justice to the architects of the evil. Instead, we get the cinematic equivalent of a highlight reel – exciting, stylish, and engaging in bursts, but ultimately a little unsatisfying. It’s the CliffsNotes version of a story that could have used more time to unfold, a film that constantly teases a deeper universe yet never slows down enough to explore it.
There’s a great movie buried somewhere in The Gorge. Maybe even three of them. But this version just doesn’t have the patience to let them – or the audience – breathe.
