by Victoria Alexander
Silly premise with only two attractive, engaging stars.
FLIGHT RISK is a fun movie, directed by Mel Gibson and starring Mark Wahlberg, Michele Dockery, and Topher Grace. That’s it for the cast. I just kept thinking how many days Wahlberg spent on the film. A three-person movie.
Now comes THE GORGE with a two-person cast: Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy. Oh, sure, Sigourney Weaver has three scenes and a dad has a scene and some soldiers turn up briefly, but this is a two-person cast. Two people in the most outrageous circumstances for one year alone with some books and a vegetable garden.
Somewhere, we are not told where, Levi (Teller) is a highly trained sniper. Bravo, Levi is one of the five best snipers in the world. Levi’s new mission is not explained to him, nor is his salary. Levi gets dropped off someplace in the remote world and met by the man he is replacing. His predecessor tells him nothing except he is to make sure no one goes into the Gorge or, if something tries to get out, to kill it. His outpost faces a big pit. All he has to do is look at the pit and make a radio check-in every 30 days. The only problem Levi has are the constant nightmares about the hundreds of men he has killed. If it was that upsetting, why didn’t Levi stop at 10 or 20 or 30 kills?
On the other side of the Gorge is a Lithuanian highly trained sniper, Drasa (Taylor-Joy). We assume she has been told what Levi has been told. They have no idea what lives in the Gorge. Drasa is beautiful and extremely thin. Too thin to fight whatever is threatening to rise from the depths of the big pit. Her weapon of choice weighs more than her.
Why would an agency send these two young people to spend a year alone?
Levi and Drasa only have high-power machinery and sophisticated binoculars to watch each other. If the two “lookouts” were two middle-aged men, they wouldn’t bother to watch each other all day and night. But Levi is enchanted by beautiful Drasa. They communicate by writing notes to each other.
For Drasa’s birthday, Levi glides across the vast Gorge to her side for a dinner of rabbit pie. Stinking from the rough and dangerous maneuver across the vast distance separating them, Drasa tells him to take a shower and she will leave clothes outside for him. She leaves the clothes and a towel away from the shower making Levi run naked for the items while she watches.
This being the Hollywood-woke era, it is Drasa who quickly ends the dinner small talk and puts on a record and starts seductively dancing. She must make the first and second moves. Levi, being the perfect Hollywood hunk, passively accepts Drasa’s dominant sexual initiation. They fall in love.
They jointly kill thousands of near-human violent beings coming up from the gorge. After another visit to Drasa’s side on his way back to his post, Levi falls into the gorge and Drasa goes into the gorge to save him.
Since it’s a two-person cast, the explanation must be on a tape. All they have to do it kill every almost human and strange insects and then find a way out of the gorge. Climbing out of the gorge is impossible.
This silly conceit makes good use of its appealing stars. Due to the limited external stimulations, Taylor-Joy has the ability to telegraph emotions with her facial expressions. Her extreme weight loss will work against this skill in the future. Every star is getting extremely thin due to the weekly injection. It’s the Twiggy Revival or the “Heroin Chic” era of fashion now the dominant look of A list actors.
Politicians are still fat because as Henry Kissinger famously said: “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.”
Interesting that the SNL 50th Anniversary show had Miles Teller interviewed by Bronx Beat’s Amy Poleher, Maya Rudolph and Mike Meyers the very weekend THE GORGE streamed on Apple TV. Perfect placement.
Directed by Scott Derrickson from a screenplay by Zach Dean, the stars have a lot of heavy lifting carrying a movie without a major villain with a personality.
The ALL is Mind; The Universe is Mental.” Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer Critic.
For a complete list of Victoria Alexander's movie reviews on Rotten Tomatoes go to:
Contributing to:FilmsInReview: http://www.filmsinreview.com
Member of Las Vegas Film Critics Society
Personal email: victoria.alexander.lv@gmail.com
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